Online Journalism

Briggs: Chapter 11

February 29, 2012

Building a Digital Audience for News

Content of interest should be easily found through search engines and social media sites.

Measuring journalism

• Track, measure and adapt

Track all that you publish

• Total news stories per day
• News stories by topic
• Total blog posts per day
• Slide shows per week
• Videos per week
• News updates
• Social network posts
• User-generated content

Set benchmarks

• Set goals with criterion such as audience numbers, revenue, audience satisfaction
• Think broadly when setting goals

Use web analytics software—Google Analytics—to track your audience

Identify key data points

• Pageviews
• Visits and unique visitors compared
• Engagement (amount of time spend on the site)
• Referrers (where traffic is coming from)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engines

• Spiders and robots- small computer programs sent to record information on Web pages report back to search engines
• Indexing- catalog where search engines refer to when users perform a search
• Queries- computer programs take keywords and checks index for relevant results and presents them to Web page

SEO to grow audience

• Aim to have Website among the first 10 search items
• Utilize descriptive links and title tags
• Write effective headlines
• Headlines should be simple and direct for the readers
• Robots will easily recognize a  headline that contains search repeated keywords throughout the story
• Write for readers with Google in mind
• Use conversational language
• Engage potential readers

Use social media as distribution channels

• News media Web sites should participate, comment and link

Increase social capital

• Journalists should be a trusted center for a community
• Participate in social media conversations and engage the audience to generate a two-way conversation
• Aim to humanize journalism

 

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