Civilities - media structures research

Part 5: TimesSelect, SEO, and Google

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 02:40:20 -0400

In the previous section, we suggested that the Times, or any other newspaper, could well offer a premium service which allowed for perks like ad-free viewing and unmoderated discussions posts. Charging for content, on the other hand, has the effect of reducing the visibility to new audiences.

Some observers, without having done any calculations, assumed that instead of reducing, TimesSelect represented an absolute closure. Jay Rosen, in his PressThink blog wrote: “Times agrees to drop Times Select, which was a barrier to Google--and the blogosphere--working the right way.” Barbara Quint, in her otherwise excellent article in the trade publication Information Today similarly rema: “The opening of content also allows blogs, social networks, and other online sources to link to NYTimes.com articles and draw Web users to the site.”

Part 4: TimesSelect, the Business Case

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:20:45 -0400

In the last part, I discussed how many of the reactions to TimesSelect were more driven by emotion than anything else. Just yesterday, Morgan Stanley announced that they were selling their 7.2% stake in the The New York Times Company. The reactions piled up ( “Another Grim Milestone,” “Getting out while the getting is bad,” and taking the cake: “Another Bullet in the Old Gray Lady's Ass”). More of the media bloggers have stronger backgrounds in reporting than in publishing, and thus don't naturally delve into the numbers.

Part 3: TimesSelectors and TimesRejectors

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 01:15:12 -0400

In part 1, found that the number of blog references to the Top 7 Times columnists had likely dropped by 20% against their pundit peers. That's not a bad number considering, that new data from compete.com shows that Op-Ed readership a month ago (before TimesSelect ended) was 45% of what it is today. Thus bloggers didn't have a neutral effect in conveying the words of the Times Op-Ed stars to the online reading audience. In fact they were helpful; they were brokers of information in demand. Now that all readers can access the Times Op-Ed columns directly, the relative influence of such brokers diminishes.

TimesSelect Pundit Buzz, Aggregate Data

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:45:43 -0400

The previous graph leads us to wonder whether we are viewing a power law.

A system exhibiting the power law is where power law is one where each node grows in proportion to its current size: thus, the rich get richer. That is, if twice as many people blog about David Brooks than Bob Herbert, we'd expect Brooks's readership to grow twice as fast. And, in fact, that did happen. But it didn't happen across the board. The top 10 of 50 only had 56% of the mentions of the total list in the first period (ending 2003); this number had fallen to 47% by this year.

TimesSelect Pundit Buzz Rankings, Before and During

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:41:36 -0400

The following numbers list references to the writer's name in the blog posts. Certain columnists are commonly known by a nickname (Tom, Bill, Nick, Josh), and thus I queried both results and added them together. It is possible these include overlapping pages. In one case (George Will), I had to estimate the number of references to the columnist and not to the coincidental use of his name in a completely different context: from looking at the last 50 blog posts, 20% were constructions where “will” was used as a verb. (USA Today: "Boy George Will Be Picking Up Street Trash.")

Part 1: TimesSelect Buzz Rankings

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:25:50 -0400

Three weeks ago, Jeff Jarvis wrote on his blog: "TimesSelect cost the paper much more in the internet age: It took the Times columnists out of the conversation and reduced their influence in America and worldwide."

This sentiment was echoed by many and challenged by few. We'd like to look at the data, but first we must understand the terms.

TimesSelect Pundit Buzz Graph, 2003-2007

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:18:42 -0400

This chart visually illustrates the number of mentions from blogs to columnists in the previously-defined "punditsphere" in each of the last four years up until September 17, 2007 (see the source data). Each year is illustrated by a different color:

TimesSelect Pundit Buzz: Annual Growth

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:01:51 -0400

Continuing our analysis, we want to get a better measure of the annual growth. The first column takes the blog popularity from the 12 months ending 9/17/2005, and compares it to the prior 12-month period. As noted before, we are using the odd cutoff date of 9/17 to roughly correspond to the TimesSelect period (see data).

The TimesSelect Reader

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:00:00 -0400

Two years ago, and ten years into its web era, the New York Times introduced TimesSelect as a value-added service for its 2 million subscribers and ultimately 227,000 subscribers who paid a fifth of what either Sunday or Mon-Sat subscribers were paying. The values included access to 100 articles a month from the archives, as well as access to its popular columnists, no longer free to the casual Internet reader. The service was much derided by bloggers, who had felt that the attaching of a fee to previously free material was heresy, or bad for business, or both. The service ended last week after a two-year run.

Part 2: Times Readership Numbers

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 06:48:19 -0400

What happened to the audience during the two years of TimesSelect?

Google reports that there were 4.8 million references to "New York Times" in the blogs over the two years. If we assume that these posts generally referenced one of the 350,000 published articles over the two years (at least, to the same degree that a reference of "Frank Rich" referenced a particular column-- a BlogPulse trend graph tends to confirm a weekly peek of a weekly columnist), then we conclude that the averages references per article is 14. One can infer that the columns, at least to the opinionators in the blogosphere, are ten times as popular. Still, the 177,169 references only represented 3% of the blog buzz to the Times. Suppose we double this to account for the TimesSelect columnists in the Other sections, and then apply our 20% loss, we then conclude that the perceived audience drop for nytimes.com as a whole was 1-2%.

Comparing Blog Buzz Measures

Tue, 9 Oct 2007 13:27:35 -0400

There are three common resources to measure "buzz" through historical mentions of names/phrases on blogs. This article compares the data available for each from common search terms.

Meet the Punditsphere

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 22:59:35 -0400

Our interest is the influence of the New York Times columnists. Let us propose that they inhabit not just the blogosphere, but punditsphere, comprising the top political columnists of the day. The blogosphere at large links to the much smaller punditsphere with much more concentration than the other way around. Combined, the pundits receive a fraction of the total references or links on any given day, but because the pundits individually get the most links, people pay them the most attention. It is within the punditsphere that the Times columnists compete especially for attention.

Hosting Puff: Why Doesn't the Huffington Post Try Harder?

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:01:27 -0400

Pick any item that's been in the news. It's quite likely that a Huffington Post contributor has taken a stab at it-- and left it bleeding. While the best work on the blogosphere is driven by strivers who are pushing themselves to report better, the HuffPost is filled with divers who are coasting on the soft expectations for blogs. Rather than fighting reader-for-reader as the solitary blog striver does, the blog diver on the Huffington Post can very quickly reach thousands of readers, forming a ready echo-chamber. (As with DailyKos, some items are featured on the front page, and many are not; but it's not clear viewing an individual post from the archives via a search engine whether it had appeared on the front page.)

Blogger Archetypes, Too: Strivers, Divers, and Thrivers

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:38:29 -0400

A couple of years ago, I offered a set of blogger archetypes. I came up with six based on the motivations of bloggers (singers, ringers, wingers, fingers, stringers, flingers). They didn't catch on very well, perhaps because there wasn't very much holding the set together beyond the rhyme. But I did want to distinguish those bloggers who didn't see themselves as playing any role in the news process and those that didn't take themselves to seriously (the “singers,” with a nod to Walt Whitman) from those that do.

Renamed...

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:26:16 -0400

you're looking for Prix Foxe. I renamed it; I had a misspelled a cross-language pun.