New Politics, Polls and the Media #nlpoli

Given that the local media missed the single major story of the 2011 provincial general election until after it was over,  the editors and journalists in the province might want to think about how they can better cover the next provincial election.

And he will get mail, too

Geoff Meeker in the first of what looks like a series of posts over at The Telegram on the war being waged by the Danny Williams Fan Club on local news media.

If history is any guide, Geoff will get more than a few vicious e-mails of his own.

One can only imagine what attention Bob Wakeham is getting. 

-srbp-

The Curious Drop Two: site design and content?

Some people left interesting comments on why some local news websites have experienced apparent traffic drops over the past 12 months or so.

Another comment came on Friday as an aside in a conversation.  Maybe it was tied – as the suggestion went – to the change at the vocm.com website.

Nope.

The start of the drop predates the change-over, although the drop seems to accelerate somewhat after July 2009.  The website changed some time in June.

And that wouldn’t explain the corresponding – although less severe  - drop at the Telegram.  The Telegram has also changed its website content over time, adding some blog space and bumping up its “breaking” news space to the point where you can sometimes get one line virtually all of what will eventually appear in the next day’s print edition.

That should have produced an uptick in traffic, especially from news junkies who will click the three local sites to see what is going on right now.  That’s likely what the Telly editors thought when they went down the road.  More eyeballs can and should produce an upward trend in readership and that helps sell more hard copies.  It should also help boost revenue from advertising online.

Now the other part of the VO conversation was a comment that the site is appalling.  Yes it is, agreed your humble e-scribbler.  It is an assault on the eyeballs, for the most part. 

The news content is also curiously presented, as labradore noted on Friday.  A story on the by-election in Terra Nova features a giant odd-angled shot of Hisself.  it’s got the “WTF-I-never-knew-you-were-behind-me” look to it. Good on Linda or whoever it was for carrying on the fine Scott Chafe tradition of getting the flag in the shot, too.

If the site change didn’t cause the drop, it sure as hell didn’t arrest the development.

The whole thing is rather curious.

And the cogitation on it continues here and  - very likely – at the newsrooms involved as well.

-srbp-

The curious drop

Take a break from all the kerfuffle in the universe and take a look at some interesting statistics on two local media websites that anyone can find using Google trends.

These are 2008 daily unique visitor figures for vocm.com and thetelegram.com.

 

These are the 2009 figures for the same sites.

Now if you can’t quite pick out those numbers, be assured that they have dropped. The Telly website has dropped from an average of over 3,000 unique visitors per day to something around 2,000 by rough estimate while at VOCM, the daily traffic has dropped by about half.  It’s gone from over 6,000 unique visitors per day to as few as 3,000 in early October.

For those who don’t know, the Telly is the province’s major daily newspaper.  VOCM is the flagship of Steele Communications.  The company is the province-wide commercial radio entity, operating both AM and FM outlets across the province.

Now without access to listener data for VOCM or more current daily subscription data for the Telegram, it’s hard to know if this is unique or part of an overall pattern of decline in audience. 

In 2008, the Telly was showing about 22,000 paid subscribers each the weekday and 41,000 for the Saturday edition. The company axed its Sunday edition in 2008 and at the time of its demise, the Sunday paper was pulling no more readers than the weekday editions.  That may have boosted the Saturday numbers somewhat subsequently but it would still be a far cry from the 60-odd thousand and more the Telly used to print a decade and more ago.

Things are not any better at the Mother Corp.  The figures below are for the main cbc.ca site, not the local version, but the numbers are not encouraging either.

At the national level, the mighty Ceeb is having a bit of a problem of its own.  It’s online audience has fallen from somewhere around 150, 000 uniques a day down half that much or less in 2009 (below.  

Now there’s no big analysis here.  This is just one of those things your humble e-scribbler noticed in passing and then filed away to think about. That’s the way online writing actually happens:  it’s a work in progress and many times thinking evolves over time.  If it really works people can bring ideas to the table, and in the mix of discussion new ideas emerge.

That’s really one of the big strengths that online writing on current affairs has over all traditional media.  It really can become much more of a collaborative experience or a shared experience of discovery and understanding. 

Maybe that’s where this will lead, to an examination of the local media websites and the impact online writing has had on some aspects of local news media.  Maybe it will lead somewhere else.

In any event,  this is some of the curious information that sometimes pops up.  What it means will be something for another day.

-srbp-

Water Street Fire Photos

A section of the downturn that burned recently was destroyed by fire last night.

The Telegram has some action photos of the fire and the response that are worth checking out. 

This is spot news.

-srbp-

Harper hides

Okay, so the guy who will only speak to reporters in highly controlled conditions, is now canceling all media availabilities for the remainder of the campaign.

And this surprises who, exactly?

Meanwhile, in other news, reporters are burning their notebooks and any electronic record of their gushing over Harper's sudden appearance at breakfast early in the campaign. [Link to a National Self-Lampoon version.  Yes, it's the Lampoon but for some reason other media outlets fell for the bullshit even though they are genetically predisposed to ingest pre-digest pap and regurgitate it on command.]

Like that wasn't contrived either.

Sheesh.

During this campaign we have seen once again the ability of news media types to completely ignore the fact they are being manipulated despite ample evidence of the intention to manipulate.

Does anyone  - you'd have to be old enough - recall the whole roll of the dice piece from the Globe right before the whole Meech end game?  Same idea.

-srbp-

The New Idiot Box

A few days ago, your humble e-scribbler was wandering through a second-hand book store he used to frequent in Kingston 20-odd years ago.

The city is roughly the size of St. John's but in the 1980s, the difference between the two cities could not have been more stark at least when it came to the number of book stores.  There used to be a half dozen new book stores and almost as many second-hand used book places along Princess Street, in the city's main shopping district downtown.

Today, it's down to an Indigo outlet with its trendiness, a locally-owned new-book store,  and another used store catering to a "higher-end" clientele. Down toward the bottom of the street, between Ben and Jerry's and a health food store, there's this tee shirt, a pair of jeans and comfortable sandals kinda place.

It's getting harder every year to stay open, according to the owner, as he filled out the receipt for a purchase. That comment started a chat about the changing reading habits of Kingstonians. The town is home to Queen's and the Royal Military College, giving the town a distinctly academic flavour.  The downtown shopping district, where all those bookstores used to be is in easy walking distance of the Queen's student ghetto housing and the cadets from RMC.