Traditional News Should Ignore Online News Weirdos
“But The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age brands have been scarred by their print and online incoherence.
Some even argue that often fluffy and irrelevant internet content is starting to fatally drive the papers, particularly the Sydney Morning Herald.”
And it got me thinking, what if we took this to the total extreme and the popularity of online stories solely determined the main stories of the national dailies? Imagine if the most clicked on stories were given the most attention in our traditional press titles. Would we see covers and headlines such as this?
There are a number of reasons why the popular articles on online news sites are different to what is in their press counterparts. It may be a case of feeling comfortable to access different content online, using online news sites for ‘snippets’ of information or the viral factor which cause us to love sex, nudity, celebrity and freaks online. I’m sure there are hundreds of other contributing factors.
Whatever the case, for the sake of keeping my breakfast down in the mornings, this is one case where I hope traditional press turns a blind eye to their online counterparts.
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Great post, and interesting idea.
It does raise the question of how they have measured article effectiveness prior to the tracking allowed on the internet.
I mean the industry has always had certain ideas about “what sells”, but how accurate can we be when the only metric is circulation/sales and each newspaper includes 100′s of stories?
And how about this for an idea – a daily delivered ‘newspaper’ which compiles all your rss feeds? Online news weirdos don’t seem so bad with innovations that provide people with the most relevant information for them.
Thanks Andrew – it does indeed. Would be very interested to see if there is a tracking study out there that measures eyeball time over newspapers and the time devoted to ‘serious’ news vs ‘weird’ news. Maybe we’ve always spent more time on the trivial but never measured it?
Either way, newspaper publishers have always relied on the front page headline to determine spikes in sales and most of the time this is semi-decent news (let’s just say a pole dancing midget would not make it on there).
As for your idea – it is brilliant and I have just heard of someone doing it here – http://www.feedjournal.com. I haven’t signed up to use it yet but would be interested to see if anyone else has?
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Another Advertising Wanker
Nathan Bush
Interactive Strategist, BCM
Brisbane, Australia
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