Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

How do you measure a year in news? 2016 brought political earthquakes in the U.S. and Britain. Police shootings and terror attacks were recorded on cell phones. In pop culture, we collectively mourned for Prince and Carrie Fisher, gaped in astonishment at Sean Penn’s gonzo interview of El Chapo, and celebrated human achievement at the Rio Olympics. Reporters turned these events into stories that drew the attention of millions of readers.

A new report out this week from web analytics firm Chartbeat reveals the best of the best — “the stories that defined the breadth, the depth, and the power of journalism in 2016” — drawing on data from more than 50,000 media sites around the world.

How does one story stand out in a sea of content? It has to be outstanding journalism.

The 102 stories on the list had the most total engaged time — how long online visitors spent actively reading — of all the stories that Chartbeat measured. In total, they commanded 2.5 billion engaged minutes, or almost five millennia of the world’s collective attention.

Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by politics, with Nate Silver’s Election Forecast at the top. The top breaking news story is CNN’s coverage of the Orlando nightclub shooting in June. Sports, opinion and entertainment make the list as well....

In August, Washington Post Managing Editor Cameron Barr and his fellow senior editors decided to do something about a problem that had been niggling at them for some time:

Articles were becoming too long, often for no good reason.

"We were seeing too many pieces that were in the mid-range of their ambition and their success — coming in at 60, 70 inches of copy," Barr said. "We were seeing the same thing in a number of blogs, where pieces were just too long, and we felt as though editors were not applying the necessary discipline and rigor in how these pieces were being handled on the desk."

The solution? A newsroom-wide initiative to cut down on editorial flab, Barr said. Since the middle of August, he's asked Post's department heads to take responsibility for articles longer than 1,500 words online or 50 inches in print. Bylines, captions, headlines and subheadings don't count....

The 'magic of mobile' session at yesterday's PPA digital conference was a chance for key players in mobile publishing to explain what has made their products a success.Jonny Kaldor, whose Pugpig publishing platform provides mobile apps for Grazia, Which?, The Spectator, Men's Fitness, The Week and more, told Journalism.co.uk what he believes are the key points to remember for publishers looking to go mobile....

Using NewsWhip Analytics, we found the top 10 stories from five of our top 10 Facebook publishers in December 2016. NewsWhip Analytics can give data on hundreds of stories from different publishers over various time periods, allowing audience development and analytics teams to perform in-depth analysis on their most successful content.

We ranked the stories by total engagements they received on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, and then calculated the average word count for the top ten stories. We didn’t include headlines, subheadings, pull quotes, or calls to action within the story (‘Read More’, ‘Scroll down for video’ etc) in the word count.

Here’s what the average length of the top ten most engaged stories from five top publishers were in December....

What if, in the mad dash two decades ago to repurpose and extend editorial content onto the Web, editors and publishers made a colossal business blunder that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars? What if the industry should have stuck with its strengths—the print editions where the vast majority of their readers still reside and where the overwhelming majority of advertising and subscription revenue come from—instead of chasing the online chimera?

That’s the contrarian conclusion I drew from a new paper written by H. Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim of the University of Texas and published this summer in Journalism Practice. Buttressed by copious mounds of data and a rigorous, sustained argument, the paper cracks open the watchworks of the newspaper industry to make a convincing case that the tech-heavy Web strategy pursued by most papers has been a bust. The key to the newspaper future might reside in its past and not in smartphones, iPads and VR. “Digital first,” the authors claim, has been a losing proposition for most newspapers....

If you want some light reading for eternity, Google the question “is the media biased.” The question is a staple of both the political right and the socialist left.

Either The Media is partisan against Republicans as part of our obvious liberal agenda, or the Corporate Media insidiously perpetuates the status quo by shutting out dissenting voices and uncomfortable narratives in favor of crony capitalism and entrenched privilege.

Choose your favorite. They’re both idiotic....

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti just sent a memo to his employees about the company's growth and its plans for the coming year, and it was loaded with some pretty impressive numbers. August was apparently a big month for BuzzFeed, with record traffic of 85 million unique visitors. For contrast, Twitter gets about 91 million U.S. users per month and Amazon gets 77 million U.S. users, according to Quantcast.

Based on U.S. users alone, BuzzFeed has ~41 million users, bigger than Craigslist or AOL.The company saw a record profit as well (no numbers disclosed, but Peretti says that the company went from "zero revenue four years ago to a profitable company with over 300 employees")....

In the beginning of this year, Andrew Sullivan made the bold decision to part ways with The Daily Beast and turn his popular political blog The Daily Dish into a stand-alone business. As part of that move, Sullivan announced that the blog would forego ads and generate revenue through a metered paywall and an annual subscription fee for those who wished to pay.

Some questioned whether Sullivan would be able to make enough money from this model to support the business, which includes a team of writers and editors. On Monday, however, Sullivan revealed that he is already more than two-thirds of the way towards his goal for the year — after less than two months.

The Dish has brought in approximately $611,000 to date, the vast majority of which came before the paywall went up on Feb. 1 as many generous readers paid more than the $19.99 annual subscription fee to help Sullivan get the website on firm footing. In the three weeks that the paywall has been up, Sullivan says The Dish has brought in $93,000 in subscriptions thanks to the metered model. Sullivan's goal for the entire year was $900,000 in order to avoid pay cuts or other significant changes to the operation.