newspaper

Not writing about not comparing print and online audiences…

April 15, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I had an amazing response to my previous post, ‘Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats‘, including a good follow up post by Martin Belam, the invitation to repost and start contributing to the Online Journalism Blog, great comments from Dave, Neil and Andrew, and most impressively, Martin Lengeveld updated his original post with a link and details of my post.

Inspired by all of this, I’ve decided to take the undoubtedly risky approach of not only poking holes in the arguments of others, but to try and maybe answer some of them – but that proved more difficult than expected, (partly due to the epic victory of Chelsea in the Champions League game vs Liverpool last night)

Initially I started brainstorming measures that could be broadly equivalent with some work – could the effort of walking to a shop and paying for a print copy be judged equivalent to reading a website? Commenting? Subscribing via RSS?

But then I got hit by a far more fundamental question.

Why are we trying to compare print readers and online readers in the first place?

And it’s a serious question.

Because if you run a publishing business, you’re going to make judgements about print and online on revenue. And scale in both mediums is a byproduct of an advertising model based on number of eyeballs, usually within a target location/demographic, or from being able to attract flat rate advertisers by being able to claim the largest readership.

The actual scale itself doesn’t matter once we’re in the same ballpark and seeing trends in readership over a reasonable period?

Or am I missing something?

Or are we trying to find figures to justify editorial or marketing resource? Or refocus online media commentary?

Only when the reason for the measurement is clear is it going to be possible to try and devise a method for comparing ‘domestic print apples and global multimedia organges’ (quoting Mr Belam).

I’m actually heading off to a Twitter-based event called Aperitweat tonight, organised by good friend @tojulius, so I’m hoping great food and conversation will fuel something closer to a conclusion rather than more questions! (Apparently you can watch the event live on Ustream– I’ll be the scruffy one…)

And I’m also hoping to keep the brilliant contributions coming from Dave, Neil, Andrew, Paul Bradshaw and maybe Martin himself to produce something from my hopefully constructive criticism – and if not, perhaps just an agreement to never compare print and online audiences directly again?

Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

April 14, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Although hardly newspaper/print apologists, both John Duncan and Martin Langeveld have posted interesting articles trying to compare the print/online split in newspaper readership in number terms. Duncan comes in with online having 17% of page impressions on Inksniffer using the Guardian as a case study, while Langeveld posts that only 3% of newspaper reading happens online.

While I totally agree that it’s easy to overestimate the online figures in comparison to print products, and both articles are good reality checks, I have to say that I think comparing print and online readerships directly in this way is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.

And touting the eventual figures is very dangerous.

For starters, the readership of print titles rests on research figures for average shared readership of titles. For instance, the metrics John Duncan quotes are:

From 2007:

Average daily UK uniques for Guardian website: 270576 (after discounting overseas readers etc).

Average UK sales of Guardian/Observer: 310788

But then the UK sales figures is multiplied by 3 to take into account shared readership, becoming 932,364, on figures available by the Guardian.

Meanwhile Langeveld refers to an engagement study from the Newspaper Association of America conducted in February 2006, based on 4594 respondents to a survey.

Now shared readership definitely happens, and without being able to actually see what people do, rather than what they claim, it’s impossible to be totally accurate.

But…

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.

And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available) it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.

After all, two years ago, Facebook didn’t have 200 million users, Twitter had just launched, there was no iPhone, there was less broadband penetration in the UK, there hadn’t been events like earthquakes or Mumbai to highlight realtime information, etc, etc.

And there’s a big elephant in the news room: Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?

I can get digital news on my mobile or my PC, via text,audio or video, and via social networks, blogs, websites, link aggregators, RSS, podcasts, videocasts, and from global sources. Whether or not print titles are only seeing a small percentage of their print readership visiting them online is less relevant, than how many of those readers are getting news content online from any source.

So what can you do?

When it comes to looking at the situation now and for the future, the numbers are far less important than looking at data trends. I’d much rather base a theory or business strategy on a few years of data showing a rise in one area and a fall in another. The numbers are rough guides to point towards when the trends are in the same area, but that’s all.

Just to reiterate, I don’t want to criticise John and Martin for doing what is a useful, if flawed, exercise to highlight caution in assuming that online readership is bigger than it really is, or that print readership is smaller than you might think. As I tried to comment on the Nieman Labs site (sadly it vanished into cyberspace after I submitted it), it’s the way the information is being presented that worries me.

UK regional newspaper opens up to live input

May 13, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Just saw this via @adrianmoss on Twitter. The Liverpool Daily Post is live blogging today about how the paper and website are put together, and inviting readers/users to share ideas and talk about what they want to read.

It’s going on until midnight, and there seems to be a constant stream of questions coming in from interested readers, ranging from debates about content to finding out if the editorial staff need to drink a lot of coffee to stay awake.

It’s a really good initiative for a number of reasons, including the fact that it conveys the enthusiasm and excitement of working for the paper, as well as giving more accessibility and greater insights into the paper – and into the readers. And seeing as the Liverpool Daily Post is part of the Trinity Mirror group, if this is successful it could be carried across to a lot more titles. I just hope this is the start of something, and not just a one off initiative. Certainly the comments of the Editor, Mark Thomas, indicate there’s a reason to be hopeful:

“I’m sure a lot of people will be surprised at the decision to make our next day’s stories public before they are published, but our readers are intelligent, questioning people whose input will enhance our news-gathering operation. I look forward to sharing my thoughts with them and hearing their own views as the day progresses.”

An amazing piece of crowdsourcing by a newspaper/website

February 24, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Just a short update, due to my need to finish decorating a nursery and cooking the evening meal. But I had to share one of the best examples of crowdsourcing I’ve seen, and by newspaper and website. (I picked this up via Jeff Jarvis)

Documents relating to the assassination of John F Kennedy have been discovered in a vault by the Dallas Country District Attorney, and he’s made them available to the Dallas News. So what did the Dallas News due with the huge amount of documents, which had been compiled by the District Attorney at the time of the assassination, and never made public?

They’ve started making huge chunks of the documents available as PDFs and available for public download. And they’re asking their readers to look through these amazing documents, and let the Dallas News know if they find anything interesting.

In the old days, such a huge amount of documents would probably have ended up with a junior staff member or similar spending weeks looking through them, and despite their best efforts, missing important news.

Now, though, staff and the public can look through. And with a topic like this, you can bet there are plenty of interested academic and amateur experts rushing to read through all this new info, and who are probably better placed to judge if something is new or ground-breaking than a Junior Reporter who might have never covered the subject before.

I’m certainly intrigued enough to download some of the PDFs and have a read when I get five minutes…