news-record.com

BLOGS

Advertisement | Advertise with Us

The Editor's Log

Twittering the news, part II

I wrote my newspaper column yesterday about Twitter. In the 24 hours since publication I got 7 new followers!

Given that we have 175,000 or so newspaper readers on any given Sunday and, by my generous estimate, 15 of them regularly read my column, that's nearly a 50% follow rate!

Score!

Permalink
Tags: Newspaper readers; Twitter

Posted by John Robinson on Monday, June 22, 2009 at 9:00 am

What do you think?

8 comment(s)

Read other visitors' comments.

Other Recent Entries

For want of a Google (Nov. 8)
Lorraine Ahearn, published author (Nov. 7)
The value of comments (Nov. 6)
The Yankees at the beginning (Nov. 5)
30 years ago (Nov. 3)

RSS: Subscribe to this blog

Comments

This article has been closed to new comments. Comments are generally closed after 14 days. However, comments may be closed earlier at the discretion of the News & Record.

Inappropriate content? Please notify us.

Paul J

June 22, 2009 - 9:40 am EDT

Why do you not carry world and national news?

John Robinson

June 22, 2009 - 9:44 am EDT

I'm not sure what you mean. We have several pages of it in today's paper.

Paul J

June 22, 2009 - 10:26 am EDT

Is it not in the online edition. I look under news and only find local.

spaschall

June 22, 2009 - 11:10 am EDT

The editorial focus of news-record.com is almost exclusively local, true. There are so many good sources of national and world news online that our News and Interactive staffs decided to keep the amount of screen real estate we devoted to it online to a minimum.

We do post AP national and world headlines on the site's front page towards the very bottom and probably need to replicate that on the main News section front. There currently isn't much to our topical section fronts, and we want to evolve them into truly useful, "first class" elements of the site over time. If you have suggestions for content or features you'd like to see added or given greater play, I'm sure our News staff would love to hear them.

-- Stephen Paschall, Sr. Developer

scharrison

June 22, 2009 - 11:44 am EDT

Stephen, I know you guys have to pay AP and Reuters etal to run their stories in print, but if you've already paid for one of their pieces, do you have to pay again to run the story online?

Michael Grossman

June 22, 2009 - 1:48 pm EDT

Yes, there is an extra fee for online content, in addition to running their articles in print.

Paul, there are also links on every page in the navigation to both national and world news from AP. Just hover over the word "news" in the black bar at the top of the site.

Illiterati

June 22, 2009 - 5:23 pm EDT

Stephen, I agree that the N&R site should stay local. It's why I keep it on my daily rotation. The AP is a money pit, and I find it annoying to see identical AP stories posted on every single news site. What's the point? National/international news is available at nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com, bbc.com, etc.

I would love to see more links within N&R stories to relevant related content. News sites are painfully reluctant to link outside their sites, but it's an integral part of building traffic. If I have to Google for related info, I'm probably leaving your site. But if you include links that open in new windows, for instance, you have a better chance of keeping the reader around for a while.

Regarding the Twittering at hand? It has its place, I suppose, but the upshot of it is that blog posts feel like long-form journalism. Twitter can feel like a little cocktail party, I agree, but mostly it comes off as rampant self-promotion, which is what ultimately turned me away from it.

John Robinson

June 22, 2009 - 6:02 pm EDT

Thanks, Illiterati. We do some off-site linking and should do more. We aren't reluctant to do it for any other reason than that it takes several extra steps which take time so when we're rushed we neglect it. But we know that people are like you and why would we want them to leave the site to search for something we can give them?

As for twitter, the self-promotion depends on the twitterer. Most of the individuals at the N&R listed with my column do very little self-promotion. We know how obnoxious that can be. Of course, our N&R account connected to the RSS feed sends people straight to the Web site, but that's the only one that does that. The rest of us wander all over the place.