Please Email This Article; Researchers Say You’ll Feel Better
If fear, scandal, sex, and humor sell newspapers, it stands to reason that those topics would make for the most popular articles on news sites and blogs. Right?
Wrong!
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles and discovered that it was an entirely unexpected emotion that caused the average reader to share an article.
“Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” [Dr. Berger] said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.”
Apparently science-themed articles were among the most popular, with RNA, deer optics, paleontology and cosmology, among those most emailed.
Now, while the study appears to be very well constructed, there’s just one major flaw that I see here:
These were New York Times readers!
While we have many wonderful NYT readers that visit Marketing Pilgrim each day, I’d say that our general demographic is not quite the same. That said, you may want to consider how closely you mimic the NYT’s writing style. Here’s what worked for them:
More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics.
For me, I think I’ll stick to scaremongering, controversial studies, and wild rumors! 
44% of Google News Visitors Don’t Click Through
The third annual News Users report from research firm Outsell has some interesting findings. While more and more people are going online for their news, and fewer people are getting their information from newspapers, it seems that many online news consumers are more like . . . well, “grazers.” And this might actually be good news for Germany’s Federation of Newspaper Publishers.
TechCrunch reports that 44% of US visitors to Google News do not click on any headlines, preferring instead to skim article snippets. Unsurprisingly, the Internet is becoming an ever more popular source for news, especially what Outsell calls “news right now,” with 56% of consumers turning to online news sources (up from 33% a few years ago).
Google News and other aggregators are a more likely destination than a single paper’s website, as well, with 31% going for the aggregator and only 8% picking a news site. (18% chose other. I guess, with rounding errors, that adds up to the 56ish% turning to online news sources?)
Of course, the numbers on the Internet eroding newspapers’ subscriber base aren’t surprising. Two months ago, we saw that American consumers were will to pay as much as $3 a month for their news (which I thought was kind of crappy, though many disagreed). Turns out it’s even crappier than I thought—according to Outsell, 75% would turn to a different source if their local newspaper sites put up a pay wall, and only 10% are willing to pay for a newspaper subscription to get online access. (Cough, NY Times, cough.)
The more interesting concept here, however, is that Outsell sees Google News becoming a destination for news instead of a starting point, like Google Search is. That might actually bode well for at least one competitor—Germany’s Federation of Newspaper Publishers. As we saw yesterday, the publishers are suing Google News as a monopoly for displaying snippets from their stories. (Robots.txt. Srsly.) If it turns out that many consumers are only reading the snippets and German newspapers aren’t seeing the downstream traffic, their case may have a little more merit.
And then they could just block Google News.
What do you think? Is Google News (along with other aggregators) becoming a destination for online news? Will this US data help out the German newspaper publishers’ case?
Newspapers and Traditional Media Still Produce Most News
We in the online world take every opportunity to turn our nose up at traditional media like newspapers because they are so 1900’s. Just take a look over the past year of posts that I have done and I at times can lead that charge. For the record, I do not relish in the fact that newspapers are going by the way side in many ways. I see that they are and it’s hard not to notice. It’s not the idea of newspapers in general that is the trouble, it’s their slow adoption of the online space and the price they are paying that is most difficult to watch.
Put simply I would hate to see newspapers “go away”. It’s not likely that there will be no newspapers someday but it is likely that the consolidation and attrition in the industry will continue.
Many in the online space so “So what?! Goodbye and good riddance!” I don’t. The reason I don’t has nothing to do with the nostalgia of newspapers. If I never got ink on my hands again from flipping the pages I would survive. What does scare me, however, is just how the news is actually uncovered and then reported if there was not the front line of the traditional media.
A recent study in the Baltimore metro area showed that while there is significantly fewer traditional media outlets in the area the remaining ones are still responsible for the reporting of 95% of the “first run” news. The New York Times reports:
Looking at six major story lines that developed over one week last July, 83 percent of the reports in local news media “were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information,” said the study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center.
Despite diminished resources of established news organizations, “of the stories that did contain new information, nearly all, 95 percent, came from old media — most of them newspapers,” it said. “These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets.”
95%? That’s a little scary if you are trumpeting the end of the newspaper medium. From an advertisers perspective it’s easy to pick on the industry but from a news uncovering and development perspective we need to be careful to not cut our online noses off to spite our face.
So is Baltimore indicative of the rest of the country? Maybe, maybe not. What is of interest though is that people crave information. They crave details on events. Let’s forget about the mindless blather of the celebrity world. If you want something that superficial and fluffy then anyone can produce it. It doesn’t matter. If a mistake is made in reporting about Oprah Winfrey’s weight we’ll all survive. In things that truly impact lives it is still the job of “journalists” to report and to hopefully give the information without bias (I know, I know that doesn’t happen but one can dream….). It’s at that point that bloggers and the like can comment and help shape the news.
Where are you on this one? Would it really be a good thing if newspapers and their reporting dried up and went away? Are there enough credible and scalable online news agencies to cover the amount of “stuff” that is generated and deemed important in each new 24-hour period? I don’t think so. As a result, I am a little concerned about what might actually happen if the online world got its wish and made the newspaper industry disappear.
Your thoughts?
Google’s Eric Schmidt Chronicles Newspapers’ Decline As He Offers To Help
Newspaper reader Eric Schmidt, who happens to be Google’s CEO, has spoken frequently about his reverence for news journalism and the important role it plays in society. He and his organization have worked with and reached out to publishers to find ways to promote and expose their content online. Yet despite these overtures many newspaper [...]
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How Boston.com Made Lemonade Out Of Local Search Lemons
I always thought that Boston.com’s local search tool on the site was a model for other newspapers to replicate. However it appears that “local search” on Boston.com was something of a failure. According to a story on the Nieman Journalism Lab site it never really took off:
The reality is that Boston.com’s local search never caught [...]
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Digg CEO: Content as Advertising
In a headline from yesterday, the Wall Street Journal tells us that Digg CEO Jay Adelson has one less thing to worry about: “Profitability Is Not A Problem Anymore.” In an interview with Fox Business Network, Adelson addressed the issue of monetizing social sites—but I’m not so sure I’d say profitability isn’t a problem anymore.
Adelson says that last year was the big year for pressure to monetize social sites—”to monetize fast and to get to profitability quick. This year, not as much. We’re back focused on growth.” (That’s all well and good for them—they are “monetizing well.”) And growth is good—but haven’t we learned anything yet? Having a lot of users isn’t a business model. Relying on angel investors for the next 20 years is not a business model. (Then again, I guess focusing on growth means you don’t think about the “next 20 years” just the “next 20 users.”)
Advertising, however, is a business model—and one that seems to be working for Digg, despite the economic downturn. Despite his insistence that they have no need to worry about monetization anymore, Adelson does focus on Digg’s advertising efforts—and recommends their model to newspapers (typos corrected) (because I’m like that).
Right now what we do is we go to these advertisers and try to convince them to create content as advertising. Instead of the standard billboard or whatever you read on the Internet, we’re going to create ads – and we do create ads – that are literally content, so if you click on it you read an interesting story or article, and you put branding next to it. And we get literally get 100 times the clickthrough rate of what a typical ad would get, so that’s good for advertisers. Now if I can take that same concept and syndicate it and put it on a newspaper site and help them monetize it the same way, I can help them solve their problems.
But advertising isn’t a panacea, even for Digg—while Adelson says that “We’re making money which is the most important thing” (not growth? Hm.), he also notes, “I feel like we’re going to get to profitability” (but he’s not losing sleep over it).
What do you think? Could the content as advertising model work for newspapers or other social sites (*cough*cough*YouTube)? How would you feel if you clicked on content only to discover it was (partially) advertising?
Rupert Murdoch to Google: “Steal” Someone Else’s Stories!
I’ve decided that I really don’t need as many of you coming to Marketing Pilgrim each day.
In fact, I’ve decided to start charging for the content that we publish.
Oh, but I will still keep the advertisers’ money. They’ll just have to get used to the idea that we don’t have as many eyeballs viewing their ads.
And, lastly, I’m kicking out Google. Yeah, I don’t need it bringing any additional readers to the site. They just consume extra bandwidth.
Have I gone insane?
I haven’t–I’m not really doing any of the above–but media mogul Rupert Murdoch quite possibly has!
Speaking in an interview with his own Sky News Australia channel, Murdoch–whom I can never look at without thinking of Spitting Image–bluntly explained how he might ban Google from indexing his newspapers’ content:
“I think we will [remove our websites from Google’s search index] but that’s when we start charging,” he said.
He added: "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep."
I’m not going to bore you to death with obvious statements about the death of newspapers and web users expecting free content, so I’ll just let you make up your own mind as to whether Murdoch is a genius or not.
For those of you interested, you can watch the entire interview here, or below:
Google To Murdoch: Go Ahead & Block Us
The long-running debate over Google and its impact on newspapers and journalism took another turn today when News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch said his company may makes its sites invisible to Google, and Google fired back by saying, in essence, bring it on.
It began with this interview on Australia’s Sky News (which Murdoch owns), reported [...]
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Tribune Co. Papers Set to Go Almost AP-less For Trial
Imagine just a few short years ago what a headline like this may draw out from the newspaper industry and newspaper readers alike. The shock of such a claim would be the first reaction followed by the naysayers that would predict the rapid decline and fall of the newspaper company silly enough to make such a move.
Welcome to 2009. The newspaper industry is a shambles and no one is able to cover up the fact anymore. Online delivery of news and media of all sorts has changed the way consumers obtain and ingest the news. As a result the delivery is changing. In a way, it’s like a huge media train wreck that has people doing and saying things never imagined before. Are you shocked, though? Desperate times call for desperate measures and it looks like the Tribune Co. newspapers are ready to at least experiment with an idea that was unfathomable until recently. No AP news wire service for the week of Nov. 8.
The Chicago Tribune and other Tribune Co. newspapers plan to utilize as little content from the Associated Press as practical during the week of Nov. 8.
The goal, as the papers review costs and needs, is to see whether severing ties with the news cooperative next fall is a viable option, the Chicago-based media company confirmed Monday.
The trial is scheduled to be conducted almost 13 months after Tribune Co. gave the AP a required two-year warning that it might drop the news service, effective Oct. 15, 2010. Tribune Co. said at the time that it was keeping its options open while weighing what role, if any, the AP would play in its future.
While it’s not a complete removal of AP sources for material this is very dramatic considering how the news business has traditionally worked seemingly forever. So where are they getting their news from you ask? Is it all going to fall on the Tribune and its paired down staff? The short answer is no.
Besides the content provided by the staff of its own titles, Tribune Co. newspapers will draw from such news sources as Reuters, the Washington Post, New York Times, Agence France Presse, Cable News Network, Global Post, Bloomberg and McClatchy newspapers during its AP-less trial. Not all of those sources are normally available to Tribune Co. papers.
How does the AP feel? They’re not really letting on with statements like this one.
“The Associated Press has been working with all members of the cooperative, including Tribune Co., to ensure that the AP news report retains its value to member newspapers and their readers,” AP spokesman Paul Colford said in a statement.
If you read through the comment thread of this article you will find some pretty dissatisfied tribune readers with the current state of the paper so maybe the Tribune Co. figures it can’t get any worse. Or can it?
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt On Newspapers & Journalism
Is Google a newspaper killer? Not by a long shot, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Nor does he want it to be. In a long interview about his company’s relationship with newspapers and the print journalism industry, Schmidt made it clear he wants established players to survive. In fact, he thinks Google [...]
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