March 10th, 2009, 15 Comments »
Something else kind of stuck in my brain from Stephen Hume’s column. His claim that the Vancouver Sun had received 10 million page views in February, 2009 seemed unusually high.
Warning: This post gets pretty web-analytics-geeky very quickly, so bail out now if that doesn’t interest.
I checked out the Sun’s online advertising site. According to their downloadable PDF, these were the traffic numbers for May, 2008:
vancouversun.com
7.2 million monthly page views to vancouversun.com
522,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on vancouversun.com
theprovince.com
3.7 million monthly page views to theprovince.com
391,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on theprovince.com
There’s some fine print at the bottom of the page which indicates that the page view numbers come from (the links are mine) “Source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, Avg. May 2008″ and the visitor numbers come from “Source: comScore Media Metrix, Total Canada, Home & Work, May 2008″.
Analytics and Panels
I take an interest in those sources because Omniture SiteCatalyst provides a more accurate visitor total than comScore. SiteCatalyst is an analytics-based tool like Google Analytics, and if it’s counting page views, then it’s counting visitors, too. Like any such ‘web-bug’ system, VancouverSun.com has code on every page that enables them to capture and report on behaviour for each of their site visitors. I grabbed a screenshot of that code from a page on the Sun’s website.
Read more…
15 Comments »
March 6th, 2009, 19 Comments »
Erin pointed me at Stephen Hume’s column in the Vancouver Sun from earlier in the week. With a certain “you kids get off my lawn” charm, Mr. Hume protests a little too much about the rise of new media:
Meanwhile, blogosphere chatter responds with gleefully patronizing pronouncements on how the “old media” are toast, about to join the pterodactyl. The “new media” leads the way to a promised land of free information and citizen journalism.
Permit a few observations from the tar pits. First, the old media are the new media. The Vancouver Sun’s website, for example, generated 10 million page views in February — more than 357,000 a day. Our blogs attract more than 500,000 page views per month and have become — let me quote from the boss’s last memo — “a vital tool to gather and distribute content.” And all these numbers trend upward.
In my experience, most thinking bloggers recognize the implicit value of the news media. We’re well past the gloating phase, and are interested in helping newspapers save themselves from their own lack of foresight. That’s why I enjoy reading Mathew Ingram and Scott Rosenberg, because they do a great job of analyzing the mainstream media’s troubles and, more importantly, they discuss solutions.
Mr. Hume also takes bloggers to task for hiding behind anonymity. This is a bit of a red herring. After all, pretty much every popular blogger identifies themselves. And Mr. Hume would do well to remember the value of anonymity for bloggers in countries like China or Iran. I wonder, does he think of them as ‘cowards’, too?
The Right Metrics
If the Vancouver Sun is the new media, then Mr. Hume ought to pick the right metrics on which to report. Nobody I know in new media uses “page views” when describing their site’s popularity. In my experience, an organization reports on page views when a) they’re not measuring their traffic accurately and b) they’re just choosing the number that sounds the biggest.
And if the Vancouver Sun is new media, why haven’t more of them come to Northern Voice? In five years, we’ve had, by my count, no more than one or two reporters out to the conference. And this is one of the biggest new media conferences on the west coast, in the Sun’s own backyard. Not to mention the fact that all Mr. Hume’s Editor-in-Chief is doing with her Twitter account is posting links to her own newspaper.
There’s plenty more to criticize in Mr. Hume’s piece. The notion, for example, that newspapers offer an “assurance of quality and public accountability” is highly dubious. But what frustrates me most about Mr. Hume’s column is the lack of proposed solutions. He offers a hagiography to journalists, but doesn’t have any suggestions for how the industry might right its floundering corporate ship. Maybe that’sin another blog post, or, rather, column? He should check out Scott and Mathew’s blogs. Not only are they journalists who play extremely well with the new media, but they’re thinking about answers.
UPDATE: In the comments, Lisa rightfully points out that I should have mention Sun deputy editor Kirk LaPointe, whose blog I read and enjoy. I’d also meant to mention the irony that while I can comment on the Sun’s news stories, I can’t comment on Mr. Hume’s editorial. It’s odd that I can’t provide feedback on the bloggiest of content.
UPDATE #2: Mike Davidson of Newsvine has written a nice piece about the demise of the print edition of the Seattle P-I: “Overall, I’m not super optimistic about the future of a lot of these newspaper companies, but I really would love to see them at least replaced with something better. I still have a hard time believing that a 146-year-old company like the Seattle P-I is moving out of their own building before we are.”
19 Comments »
December 1st, 2008, 6 Comments »
Since we’ve come back from Morocco, I haven’t been reading an offline newspaper. The local paper, the Victoria Times Colonist, is pretty mediocre. We sometimes get The Globe and Mail on Saturday, but that’s the extent of things.
While in Vancouver this week, I’ve had the chance to look through a couple of copies of the Vancouver Sun. I was interested to page through the front section of Friday’s paper. I snapped photos of the front page and pages A3 and A4. Look for the little portrait shots of the columnists:
Here’s what I was struck by: in the three (I assume) most-read pages of the paper, there were more column inches given over to editorial commentary than hard news. The same is true, as I look at it, for Saturday’s front page. It features three stories–one news piece and two editorials. I’m hesitant to use the term, but I’m struck by how bloggy the Sun is looking these days.
Is this evidence of the paper’s recognition that it is not, first and foremost, a source of timely news?
I was chatting with a reporter at a regional newspaper the other day, and she commented that her periodical was “circling the drain”. I have little sympathy for newspapers, because their operators were handed every opportunity to lead the web-based new media charge a decade ago. They declined, and they’re suffering the consequences of playing catch-up. There are obviously exceptions–The Guardian springs to mind–but too many papers seem to be clinging to an expiring paradigm.
6 Comments »
January 22nd, 2008, 14 Comments »
UPDATE: Despite repeated enquiries, Mr. Baines never replied to my questions. I eventually received a short reply from Editor-in-Chief Patrica Graham, who said:
Mr. Baines did not lie and any suggestion to the contrary would be defamatory. In answer to your questions: The Vancouver Sun stands by the stories.
That’s not a particularly complete answer to my questions, but it does indicate that the Sun claims that Tom Williams is lying, and didn’t in fact offer to connect Mr. Baines with any of GiveMeaning’s donors.
Via Tom’s blog, I just read David Baines’s shoddy column on GiveMeaning, in which he snipes at this very worthy endeavour:
But every time a donation is made, GiveMeaning issues a tax receipt, which means Canadian taxpayers are subsidizing the donation. I think that, in such an unregulated environment, we have a responsibility to scrutinize all charitable endeavours to ensure that we are getting decent value for our dollar.
The piece is full of cheap shots, misrepresentation and lazy journalism. Here are a few questions I’m hoping Mr. Baines will address:
- Mr. Baines claims that Tom “refused to identify any of these donors.” In his blog post, Tom says that he “offered for him to speak with some of GiveMeaning Foundation’s donors and yet he didn’t take me up on this.” Which is true, and if Tom is correct, why did Mr. Baines lie about it?
- Early in the article Mr. Baines calls an anecdote that Tom tells “unconfirmable”. Later Mr. Baines writes: “My sense is that…most registered charities or foundations publicly report where they are placing their money.” Instead of relying on “his sense”, why didn’t Mr. Baines contact an expert in the field and confirm his assumption? It seems highly dubious to complain about a story being unconfirmable, and then not bother to check his own facts.
- Along the same lines, Mr. Baines characterizes “many” of the GiveMeaning project charities as “extremely obscure”. Again, where’s the fact-checking on this? Mr. Baines names cites WILD ARC as one of these “extremely obscure” causes. I used this popular web search engine called ‘Google’, and discovered that it’s a BC SPCA wildlife rehab centre that’s been around for a decade and treated over 14,000 animals. The other charity that Mr. Baines names is a school in Africa with an office here in Delta. If Mr. Baines wanted to verify its scope, all he needed to do was pick up the phone and call the suburbs. That’s not to mention that leveling a criticism like ‘obscure’ at a charity is absurd. Most of the charitable good in the world gets done by charities that Mr. Baines (and you and I) have never heard of.
- Finally, Mr. Baines suggests that GiveMeaning has been spending too much of its initial funding on administration. He rightfully trots out GiveMeaning’s annual reports, but he does so in isolation. Why doesn’t he contact similar organizations (I’m thinking here of, say, Kiva, PledgeBank and the like) to compare their startup budgets?
David Baines is a columnist, but that doesn’t absolve him from the responsibilities of his profession. I’ve sent a note to him asking that he respond to these questions. I’ve also CC’d his editor-in-chief, Patricia Graham. If you’re concerned about quality of his work on this article, I encourage you to email him at dbaines@png.canwest.com as well.
14 Comments »
June 1st, 2007, 2 Comments »
For the last few years, local (local to Vancouver, that is) PR guru (and, tangentially, our client) James Hoggan has been publishing weekly PR tips in the Vancouver Sun. They’re pretty elementary , but still useful reminders of what to do and what not to do in the thorny world of public relations.
As it turns out, they’ve got over two years worth of tips on their website. Here are a couple of samples:
If You Can’t Fix it, Don’t Ask About it - A critical step in any consultation comes in conceiving the questions that you put to your audience. If you start asking for feedback on issues that you can’t – or won’t – change, you are setting them up for disappointment and yourself up for a heap of grief. So, define the parameters carefully and whatever questions you ultimately ask, be prepared to treat the answers seriously.
Public Speaking: The Risks and Rewards of Winging It - Most people have been impressed at some point in their lives by a speaker who could be scintillating off the cuff, who just seemed to grab one great idea after the other out of the air. So it’s tempting, as a presenter, to want to emulate that style. And in rare cases it could be the right thing to do if you have easy command of the material and if the risks of an error are negligible. But if the stakes are high – and you’re not completely confident – work up a prepared text. Even if you memorize it and only refer to it for prompts, the discipline may save you from making a serious mistake.
That’s a big schwack of tidbits. Some are less useful than others (do we really need tips on ‘a winning wardrobe’?) but the majority are worth reading. Especially, as Glenn Kelman recently recommended, if you want to do your PR DIY-style.
2 Comments »
