Adam Sherk » Publishing

Borrowing Content Was Happening Long Before Blogging

Adam Sherk — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:43:27 +0000

I was reading Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam’s piece on his time at Newsweek in the 1970s and this passage caught my attention:

For me, Newsweek was like an upside-down journalism school, where I learned an astonishing number of bad habits, e.g., having someone else check your facts. We poached material constantly, from newspapers, from other publications — even from Time. Copying from Time was a fact-checker’s dream, because we knew they took accuracy very seriously over there.

It sounds a lot like the practices of some industry blogs and news aggregators today. So “borrowing” content isn’t a Web-only phenomenon, it’s just a lot easier to spot now.

Shifting from poaching content to paying for it, it really is no wonder that the AP seems so threatened by Google. A wire service’s whole business model is built around selling the same content to as many news outlets as possible. That works great in print and broadcast but not so much online. Actually it would work online, if not for search engines giving users access to everything in one place and filtering out duplicate content to improve their experience. What’s a news agency to do?

The Wrap, Newser and Content Aggregation: How Much Attribution is Enough?

Adam Sherk — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:27:43 +0000

The cease and desist letter and the ensuing war of words between The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman and Newser’s Michael Wolff is getting a lot of industry attention this week. To me the real question is: when one site aggregates another’s content, how much attribution is enough?

The value and legitimacy of content aggregation is a topic for another post; I think most would agree that curation serves a more useful purpose than aggregation. But for better or worse content aggregation is a big part of online news dissemination today and I wouldn’t expect it go away any time soon. With that in mind, it is important that aggregators adhere to some basic rules of conduct: a) create their own summary text, don’t just “borrow” from the original and b) properly credit original sources through attribution links.

To see what type of attribution Newser is providing, I picked a random article from the sources grid on their home page today: Oprah Ditches Daytime for New Evening Show.

In this particular case the original article on the Wall Street Journal is linked to both inline and in the “Sources” section of the sidebar:

Two links is good attribution; I think that qualifies as giving proper credit to the original source. But as pointed out by The Wrap, Newser does not always do this. In looking at a selection of other articles in some cases only the “Sources” sidebar link is provided; The Wrap has also claimed that sometimes no attribution link was provided at all.

Personally I think aggregated stories should always include an inline attribution link. A sidebar link may not get proper attention from either users or search engines, so a link should be placed within the actual editorial content.

The Wrap is also looking for attribution on Newser’s source grid. To quote Sharon Waxman:

“All we really want is for Newser to stop pissing on our leg and tell us it’s raining. Very simply: put in credit and links where they are missing. Add a Wrap homepage link to the source grid page. Make it simple and logical to get to actual Wrap content from that page.”

Here is part of The Wall Street Journal source grid linked from that Oprah article:

This is basically a section front on Newser so it is understandable that they are linking to their own articles. But this also shows how Newser is pushing aggregation to the extreme. It is one thing to occasionally aggregate stories from various sources that you think will be of interest to your readers. It is another to mass-aggregate content from a specific publication and then package it on a hub page, even customizing the URL and title tag for SEO:

For what it is worth, Google does not seem to be assigning much value to the page. It has a toolbar PageRank score of 1, and at least in my Google results it is not in the top 50 for “Wall Street Journal.” It is on page one for “Wall Street Journal news summaries” and page two for “Wall Street Journal summaries” but according to the Google Keyword Tool neither of those phrases has any search volume:

UPDATE:
Here’s the video of the “discussion” between Sharon Waxman and Michael Wolff on CNN’s Reliable Sources (April 11, 2010). It’s safe to say they don’t get along:

Video Interview: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Like Search So Much

Adam Sherk — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:01:41 +0000

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was on Fox Business yesterday talking about the business model for media content on the Internet.

Here’s what he said he had to say about search engines:

“Search on the Internet, whether it be Bing or Google, whatever, is free. And they simply take all our expensive and we think very good content, such as Wall Street Journal or whatever, and what they call their scraper, and they use it for search. It gives them their raw material for nothing. And then they have this very clever business model of charging for searching it. We don’t get any of that. They are technologically brilliant, they are a long way ahead, but they do not have the right to do it if we want to stop them.

“They say, ah yes but because when somebody searches for something and a page comes up for a newspaper it’s registered as a unique visitor and you sell your own advertising along side that. But that is nothing like a, that’s peanuts, compared to the cost of producing a real quality newspaper. And we just need to…it’s not a question of old media vs. new media or anything like that. We’re a new media company in many many ways, look at Avatar, that’s new media.”

So Avatar good, Google bad.

It might not hurt to remember though that search engines send news sites A LOT of quality, monetizable traffic every single day, for free. Natural search can account for 10-20% of a news site’s total traffic, sometimes even 30-40%, so maybe it’s not such a bad relationship after all.

AOL Newsroom: A Model for the Future or Shades of 2001?

Adam Sherk — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:37:13 +0000

There is an interesting article in BusinessWeek on how AOL is utilizing software and analytics data in an effort to match content with user interests and monetize it more successfully.

Are you sure you want to write that article, Dave?

Is this a good thing? Done right, I say absolutely. As I’ve covered in past posts on monitoring hot search trends and dealing with seasonal dips in search traffic, news sites can leverage tools and data to gain powerful insights into what’s working and not working on their sites. This information can also be used to find the areas where editorial coverage and user interests most overlap, ultimately resulting in more traffic, pageviews and time on site.

Now that doesn’t mean that the tools should rule the roost, and applying these practices to the extreme of Demand Media or AOL’s SEED is a slippery slope. Standards of quality and editorial voice must be maintained, and news organizations in particular play a more important role in society than simply manufacturing content for the sake of making money from it.

But there is no reason not to use tools and data to help make smart business – and editorial – decisions. If news organizations can’t stay in business, they won’t be playing any role at all.

10 Quotes on the Apple iPad and the Business of News

Adam Sherk — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:40:16 +0000

Now that the first wave in the Apple iPad crazy-a-thon has past, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of what people are saying about the iPad from the perspective of the news media.

You can view this in the spirit of Robert Scoble’s To create or curate?, or catch on that I’m on a project deadline and don’t have time to contribute my own thoughts.

Either way, here are 10 quotes that caught my attention on how the iPad will impact news organizations from a business or design perspective:

“The business side of the equation will be complicated. Apple has proven over and over that when it comes to media, part of having a simple interface with consumers is having a simple price plan. Publishing companies can’t expect to offer customized pricing on separate devices – one price for Kindle, another for the tablet, and still another for people arriving on computers – and not be buried in a wave of second guessing.”
-David Carr, The iPad: A Media Machine That Opens Up a New Front

“Most important for the e-reader debate, total online ad revenues have remained a small part of newspapers’ bottom line — no more than 10% in 2009, an especially discouraging figure considering that newspapers have had a decade to work on boosting online ad revenues. The question, then, is whether newspaper publishers will do any better at monetizing mobile advertising than they have online. Again, some back-of-the-envelope math suggests they won’t.”
-Erik Sass, News Analysis: Even Apple Can’t Save Newspapers

“Editors have been telling us for years that people won’t read long stories online. Yet they will read 1,000-page novels on their Kindles. What will they be willing to read on their iPad? I predict the return of long-form journalism. At the same time, visual storytelling will take deeper, richer forms. Information design will be more important than ever. Something like New York’s Approval Matrix that we designed back in 2005 with Adam Moss is popular in print but will really come to life in this format. Some people might subscribe to it all by itself.”
-Luke Hayman, Five Ways the iPad Will Change Magazine Design

“One sticking point for publishers has been whether they will have direct access to customer data, which they would use to sell renewals or related magazines and to tell their advertisers about their audience. (That is one reason why major publishers joined a consortium, announced in December, that would offer a storefront for digital magazines.)”
-Stephanie Clifford, Condé Nast and Time Inc. Cheer iPad; Others Have Doubts

“Has the iPhone changed the traditional print media business? Not at all — unless you think selling an app for your publication (as Conde Nast has for GQ) is a game-changer. Yes, the New York Times app looks impressive, with video that plays right inside the newspaper display (although you can do that on the NYT web site, too). But will a fancier app change the nature of the newspaper business or the magazine business? No.”
-Mathew Ingrim, Will the iTablet help the media? Possibly. Save the media? No.

“The future of news is about distributing content as widely as possible and monetising not just content but relationships. Devices will be a big part of that, but they’re not the answer.”
-Patrick Smith, Why the iPad isn’t the saviour of journalism as we know it

“But what about this promised land of revolutionary hybridized content — won’t people be willing to pay for that? Thing is, that’s going to be time consuming and expensive to make. A handful of very large publishers, like the NYT, may be able to scrap together some compelling content on a regular basis. But it’s going to be difficult to quickly integrate additional supplementary material in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on.”
-Jason Kincaid, The Tablet Could Spur A Media Revolution, But It Will Be Out Of Apple’s Hands

“But the iPad, as we know it today, doesn’t change any of the fundamental economics of news commerce. On the iPhone, you can sell news apps through the App Store; you can upsell specific pieces of content to people within your apps; and you can sell advertising within those applications. (Apple takes chunks of the revenue from those first two options.) On the iPad, you can…do those same three things. The only thing that has changed is the size, and that big beautiful screen. Will people who weren’t willing to buy news on an iPhone be sold on the idea just because the text is bigger and the photos are prettier? I’d be surprised. The commerce proposition hasn’t changed.”
-Joshua Benton, So it’s called the iPad: Five thoughts on how it will (and won’t) change the game for news organizations

“The iPad makes the promise of integrated storytelling possible. (Yeah!) The Web has held that promise, but it is still often clunky. (Boo!) The good news is that the iPad isn’t locked to HTML (Yeah!), but what it will use within the iPhone operating system is unclear. (Hmmm) The New York Times app shown at the release looks great, with embedded video. How it was built is not yet public. The fabulous Sports Illustrated tablet demo was built with Adobe Air and Flex, which don’t play on the iPhone OS. Most online multimedia is built in Flash, which doesn’t play on the iPhone OS. Most audio slides shows are built in Flash. Most online video is encoded as Flash video, which — you guessed it — doesn’t play on the iPhone OS. So while it holds a lot of promise for better user interaction, figuring out a whole new platform, how to design for it and integrate our content management systems with it is going to be a big challenge for news organizations. (Sigh.)”
-Regina McCombs, What Apple’s iPad Means for Journalism Design, Multimedia & Business

“My guess is that the truly revolutionary content is not going to come from the old-guard publishers. It’s going to come from new guys, kids who have grown up digital. This notion of mashing together elements comes naturally to them. And somewhere out there, a genius is waiting to be discovered — the Orson Welles of digital media, someone who will create an entirely new language for storytelling. If you’re reading this, Orson Jr., please get in touch. I’ve got something I want to show you. Okay? Peace.”
-Fake Steve Jobs, Tablet Part Two: The true significance of the Tablet

As additional commentary emerges in the days to come, I’ll update this post with links to more good pieces.

Top 10 Reasons The New York Times is Really Putting up a Paywall

Adam Sherk — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:22:14 +0000

Today The New York Times made it official that they will be introducing a metered model starting in 2011. There is additional information in the NYTco press release, and Jim Romenesko and others have published the staff memo.

Since the NYT is giving themselves a year to work out the details before implementing the paid model, there will be plenty of time for everyone to speculate on what should and shouldn’t be done, and how spectacularly it will succeed or fail.

But instead of that, I’m going to to give you the (completely fabricated) inside scoop on why The New York Times is really putting up a paywall, in the form of a Top 10 list:

Poisoning the cafeteria didn’t scare enough people into taking buyouts
The executive bathroom in Rupert Murdoch’s “Evil Publishers” Lounge is pretty sweet
They’re planning to launch their own portfolio of blogs that do nothing but aggregate their stories – seems to work for everyone else
They’ve spent all their resources trying to brainstorm a witty comeback to that piece The Daily Show did on “aged news” last year
Since they made the International Herald Tribune site disappear, why not their own?
The metered system will pay for itself by randomly charging one user per day $10,000,000
The editorial staff figures since hardly anyone will ever see their work, they can save time by skipping every other word
In 10 years Google will control every piece of information on the planet anyway, so why not make a little cash while they can?
Clicking their heels three times and saying “there’s no place like home” didn’t bring back the pre-Internet era
Waiting a year leaves enough time for the entire industry to collapse, so they won’t have to actually come up a system that works

As Bill Maher would say, “I kid the Times” (and if you can’t joke a little about your own parent company, who can you joke about?). However my comedic talents are limited, so please bail me out by suggesting more reasons in the comments.

On a serious note, only time will tell if a paid model will position the NYT to be successful well into the future or if it will ultimately hurt more than help. Most likely the result will fall somewhere in between. But whether you agree with their approach or not, the point is they are trying to find something that works.

The reality is that the industry is being radically re-invented by new technology, and there are no easy answers out there. Coming up with a viable metered model that still allows a wide audience to discover and interact with the content – in the ways that they prefer – is just one step on a challenging road ahead. I wish them the best of luck, and look forward to seeing how things unfold.

UPDATE:
For those interested in more actual information, NYTco. senior executives have answered a series of reader questions at: Talk to The Times: Answers About Charging Online

Help Haiti: News Sites Promote Ways to Donate

Adam Sherk — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:42:46 +0000

As the devastation and human tragedy caused by the Haiti earthquake grows, people are flocking to the news media for information, and more importantly to learn ways that they can help.

I’ve been impressed by how much attention the media has given to promoting ways that people can make donations. Aid organizations are racing against time to save as many lives as they can, and what they need most right now is money. Unfortunately there are increasing reports of donation fraud online, so major news organizations are playing a vital role in directing people to credible, legitimate groups.

Here are some of the news sites sharing information on how to donate to relief organizations helping the Haiti earthquake victims:

CNN – Impact Your World
The New York Times – Haiti Disaster Relief: How to Contribute
MSNBC – Haiti earthquake: How to help
Chicago Tribune – How to Help
BBC News – Haiti: How to help
NPR – Haiti: Some Ways To Help
Fox News – Haiti Earthquake Aftermath: How to Help
Newsweek – The Latest on Haiti and How to Help
The Huffington Post – Haiti Earthquake Relief: How You Can Help
The Washington Post – Organizations accepting donations to help Haiti
USA Today – How to help victims of the Haiti earthquake
Telegraph.co.uk – Haiti: how readers of this blog can help
Guardian – Organizations accepting donations to help Haiti
LA Times – Haiti: Resources and how to help
Forbes – How to Make Sure Your Donation Helps Haitian Earthquake Victims
The Wall Street Journal – Where to Donate — and How

I’m sure there are many more; if you know of any please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

Social media users are doing their part too. Word of mouth on Twitter, Facebook and other sites (including The White House blog) has raised over $2 million to-date through mobile phone donations organized by mGive. And “Yele” is being frequently posted throughout the Web as users spread the word about Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation.

UPDATES:
Mobile phone donations have gone very well. As of January 18th mGive has raised $21 million and they are hoping to reach $30 million shortly, crediting repeated media coverage for the success of the effort.

CNN has launched Looking for Loved Ones in Haiti to help people trying to connect with missing family and friends. The Red Cross and Google also have tools for this purpose.

PEJ Study Shows Print Still Primary Source of Original News Reporting

Adam Sherk — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:03:41 +0000

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study today of the modern news ecosystem, examining a week of news activity in Baltimore, MD. You can get the details from the study itself but I wanted to point out a couple things that caught my attention.

Of the stories in Baltimore that week that contained new information, 95% came from traditional media and the majority of that from newspapers:

So newspapers can pat themselves on the back for another day. But before we dismiss online and social media sources as nothing more than aggregators and promotion outlets, let’s remember that this study reflects the state of the news ecosystem today. Things are just now beginning to shift as the economic viability of the current model is beginning to fail. New media can and will play an increasing role in original news reporting in the years to come.

Also this statement on the role of new technology in breaking news more quickly was interesting:

As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.

While many people regard press releases as little more than throw-away text, the reality is that smaller news sources in particular do in fact use that content in full or repurposed form. Bill Hunt wrote about this a while back in looking at the use of tech press releases by bloggers. So companies can increase the likelihood of their press releases being used by bloggers and local news sources by giving them a more news-like tone and dialing down the marketing hype.

Hearst Skiff Reader Looks Cool

Adam Sherk — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:51:28 +0000

Hearst’s Skiff Reader is being unveiled at CES this week. My professional, analytical opinion is it looks pretty darn good.

I hope the much-discussed digital media consortium with Hearst, Time Inc, Condé Nast, Meredith and News Corp works out. It’s an interesting project and it is good to see publishers trying new things, however slow to move they may have been to-date.

While we’re at it, here’s another look at Sports Illustrated’s tablet demo:

My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media

Adam Sherk — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:50:51 +0000

I was going to post this last week but then opted wisely for letting myself enjoy a holiday break. Also I’ve only been blogging here for about six months, so I’m still building up momentum. But since all the cool kids have been sharing their top posts I wanted to join in, plus follow my own advice on identifying your top trends.

Heck, if Brian Solis can put out 10 installments of his greatest hits for the year, I can certainly come up with one.

So belatedly here are my 10 most popular posts of 2009, by pageviews:

I’m looking forward to making new connections and contributions this year, and helping news and content sites to get the most out of their SEO and audience development efforts. Here’s wishing everyone an interesting and productive 2010.

Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

Adam Sherk — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:22:14 +0000

Today Google unveiled its Living Stories prototype, showcasing its vision of a new format for presenting news stories online. Essentially the idea is that for ongoing stories news organizations would maintain a single, consistent “living” URL that is continually updated with the latest developments.

Google has been collaborating with The New York Times and The Washington Post on the prototype; eight examples have been created to-date, such as this Living Story on health care reform:

(click on the image to see a larger screenshot)

At first pass Living Stories sound a lot like topic pages, which nearly every news site produces in some fashion now. But there is a fundamental difference between the two and Living Stories are ultimately a compliment to topic pages, not a replacement. Topic pages consolidate all of a site’s coverage on general, popular subjects such as specific news figures or companies. A Living Story takes it one level deeper by applying the concept to a specific story about that topic.

Unfortunately for him, Tiger Woods offers a good example of why news sites would want to use both. His current troubles are a perfect case for creating a Living Story since new developments continue to emerge in that story. But as big as the scandal is right now, it certainly does not represent everything there is about Tiger. So sports news sites in particular will also benefit from having a Tiger Woods topic page that encompasses his entire career and provides users easy access to his latest news, stats, biography, etc.

In looking at the current Living Story examples, one thing that struck me is that news sites will need to be careful not to pick subjects that are too broad to be effective. Stories like “The War in Afghanistan” or “The Struggle Over Health Care” do have a specific focus, but it would be easy for those pages to try to cover too much and as a result become overwhelming to users.

So bottom line, are Living Stories a good idea?

Publishers will understandably be concerned about losing page views, but a strong, consistent URL with frequent updates may well get more views (both on-site and via search referrals) than lots of scattered, separate articles would collectively. So I think it is a concept that is worth experimenting with. The main caveat being that Living Stories should ultimately be hosted on the actual news sites, not on Google.

For more information, see Principles of Living Stories and this video from Google:

UPDATE:
February 17, 2010 – Google News announced that the Living Stories code would be made open source to allow for more sites to experiment with the format. With the shift to the public phase of the experiment The New York Times and The Washington Post will no longer be updating their test pages hosted on Google Labs.

I Hope News Corp Does Block its Content from Google

Adam Sherk — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:51:32 +0000

More developments in the Rupert Murdoch vs. Google saga today, as the Financial Times reports that discussions have taken place between News Corp and Microsoft on an exclusive deal with Bing that would lead to News Corp blocking its news sites (such as The Wall Street Journal) from Google.

I’d actually like to see this happen…it would make for an interesting case study demonstrating that the only one hurt by such a deal is News Corp itself. It would also be interesting to see how Microsoft addresses the financial realities of trying to extend such an arrangement to a larger group of publishers.

Believe it or not, being indexed in Google and Google News is actually good for news sites.

Danny Sullivan has been covering the SEO aspects of this story in depth – these posts provide an overview of the key points better than I could summarize here:

Jeff Jarvis also has some good thoughts on the topic:

And Bill Tancer from Hitwise has pulled data showing just how important search engine referral traffic is to The Wall Street Journal and newspapers in general:

NewsPulse Gives CNN.com a New Way to Showcase Popular Content

Adam Sherk — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:03:04 +0000

One of the more promising features in this week’s relaunch of CNN.com is NewsPulse, which surfaces popular content in a simple, user-friendly interface:

(Click on the screenshot above to see a larger image)

NewsPulse makes it easy for users filter popular news by time period (from 15 minutes to 30 days), section and content type (articles vs. video). How “popularity” is determined is not specifically defined, but it is likely a simple metric like page views.

One aspect that CNN might want to rethink is the inclusion of “Total Comments” for each news item. Since many stories do not appear to allow comments this results in quite a few “popular” stories with zero comments, which sends a mixed message to users:

NewsPulse is still in beta so there’s likely to be some changes based on user activity and input. CNN.com is soliciting user feedback by including a prominent survey link at the top of the page:

It will be interesting to see how NewsPulse changes user behavior on the site over time. It has the potential to increase the number of stories read per visit, resulting in more page views and time on site. Part of it will depend on how deeply users are willing to drill down with the interface. Personally I think the potential upside makes it well worth experimenting with. And CNN.com has wisely maintained the typical section front structure for users that prefer to interact with the site in that way.

Smart Move from Condé Nast: GQ and DETAILS Should Have Their Own Websites

Adam Sherk — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:20:41 +0000

There’s been a lot of coverage this week of Condé Nast bringing in McKinsey & Company to help them restructure the business, which hopefully will work out for them. Props to Silicon Alley Insider for including a photo of the consultants from Office Space in their write-up.

Tuesday’s announcement that GQ and DETAILS will get their own sites in October is definitely encouraging, and is a big improvement over hosting both on men.style.com. It’s not just that users expect a branded experience on a dedicated domain. It’s that there are so many SEO and audience development initiatives, including social media marketing, that simply work better when a site exists on its own unique, branded domain.

Best of luck to both GQ.com and DETAILS.com.

A side note to Condé Nast Digital’s PR team: I’d put your online press releases on regular Web pages. People will be less likely to link to the .pdf versions in your online press room. I did it above but I didn’t really want to.

The Daily Show Visits The New York Times

Adam Sherk — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:15:07 +0000

I couldn’t resist sharing this great video from The Daily Show of Jason Jones visiting The New York Times. The back-and-forth with Assistant Managing Editor Rick Burke about “aged news” is my favorite part.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

End Times

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

So Far so Good for Seattlepi.com

Adam Sherk — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:18:19 +0000

Hearst released some numbers this week on how things are going with seattlepi.com two months after moving to an online-only model.

From their statement:

Two months after becoming the nation’s largest newspaper to move to an all-digital news model, seattlepi.com’s year over year numbers show that it has more users this April than last April, when the Post Intelligencer was still publishing with an 80% larger staff, an amazing feat for an online venture with a newsroom of 20.

In April, its first full month of operation, seattlepi.com had 4.3 million unique visitors, up 1.6% from 4.2 million in April 2008 (source: Omniture). Total page views for the month were 37.3 million.

During the last week of April, the site broke its one-day unique user record since going online-only. There were 324,000 unique visitors on April 30—the 4th highest day in terms of unique visitors in 2009—breaking previous records set since going online only on April 29 (290,000) and April 27 (283,000). Total page views for those days were 1.5 million, 1.4 million and 1.5 million, respectively.

Keeping pace after an 80% reduction in staff is a good sign, although we don’t how well they monetized the April 2009 traffic compared to April 2008. And considering the print Post-Intelligencer no longer exists you would think the increase in unique visitors might have been higher, since the website is now the only way to get their content.

On All Things Digital, Peter Kafka is still skeptical about the viability of their model and whether they can make the numbers work in a local market. But you’d think these figures mean they’ve at least got a chance. So for now we can say so far, so good. Let’s hope things work out for them.

Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining

Adam Sherk — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:47:38 +0000

According to data released by Hitwise a few days ago, News & Media is one of the few categories showing a YoY decline in share of search-referred traffic:

Fortunately the majority of sites we work with in this category are bucking the trend, as most are seeing strong improvements in YoY search engine referral traffic thus far this year.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of major publishers still get a huge portion of their traffic from direct navigation. So total natural search engine referral traffic is a more important measuring stick than what percentage of site traffic comes from natural search.

New York Times Plans to Implement Permanent Redirects on IHT.com URLs

Adam Sherk — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:38:08 +0000

For anyone who’s been following the story of the shutting down of IHT.com and the migration of International Herald Tribune content to the New York Times Global Edition, there has certainly been criticism over the lack of permanent redirects from the old IHT.com URLs to the corresponding new URLs on NYTimes.com.

It’s understandable that people were puzzled by this move, and when a major site makes a critical mistake it doesn’t take long for it to be put in the spotlight. But there is usually more to the story, and for a number of reasons companies aren’t always at liberty to share all the information.

Fortunately this week The New York Times Chief Search Strategist Marshall Simmonds (disclosure: I work for Marshall) was able to make a statement to Search Engine Land to shed some light on the matter.

Here’s the text of his statement:

I wanted to bring you up to speed on the developments around the shuttering of the International Herald Tribune site, IHT.com, and archive transfer to the New York Times, nytimes.com.

The SEO team has been involved in the project since the beginning and recommended the implementation of one-to-one 301 redirects of all IHT content to its new location at the NYT.com. This, of course, conforms to best SEO practices when moving any content and was accepted and built into the timeline. We’ve moved plenty of content at the NYTimes before without incident.

As the project progressed, and we turned our focus to other matters, the move ran into several complications and a fast approaching deadline. Rather than consult with us, the IHT project team made a last minute decision and used an interim 302 solution without understanding the SEO implications.

After launch the impact was obvious, and we moved in to correct and educate. The NYT development team’s top priority right now is one-to-one 301 mapping of all IHT content to its new location. This, unfortunately, was a perfect storm of quick fixes and lack of attention to protocol and will be fully corrected in the coming weeks.

So the bottom line is, the NYT SEO team strongly advocated the use of permanent 301 redirects from all IHT.com URLs to the corresponding new URLs on NYTimes.com, and they are continuing to do what they can internally to get this implemented as soon as possible.

This situation also illustrates a key component of managing enterprise SEO initiatives. In large organizations with multiple properties spread out in various locations, there are a lot of stakeholders involved in every project, and a lot of factors involved in each decision. What’s best for SEO isn’t always what gets done, despite your best efforts and the good intentions of all the parties involved. Thus the process of making the case for SEO internally and educating on SEO best practices and the SEO implications of all site projects and processes never ends.