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....

Tech site develops predictive platform to monetize traffic surges

In an analytics-obsessed Web climate, everyone is chasing the big story. The problem is, more often than not, big breakout traffic scoops yield attention, eyeballs and notoriety, but very few dollars. Last month, Deadspin broke the story on the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax, netting the site nearly 4 million pageviews. But as Gawker Media mentioned publicly following the story, the company had no technical solution in place to monetize an unforeseen surge in traffic.

Gawker is not alone. Web publishers have struggled across the board with this, which is why Ars Technica has been hard at work with what could be a viable solution.

At Ars Technica, Condé Nast’s 15-year-old high-brow tech site, Ken Fisher and his small in-house team were lamenting the traffic conundrum when they decided to build a real-time dashboard geared toward examining pageviews with a predictive eye toward recently posted articles that are poised to trend.

"Within two days we found it was working really well," explained Ars editor in chief Fisher. “We were identifying within an hour stories that would go on to do 900,000 views. And these were not pieces you’d hear by title and think, ‘That’s going to be killer.’ One was titled, Quantum Networks May Be More Realistic Than We Thought.”...

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....

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....

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")....