How an errant vowel sent 3 million people to The Wichita Eagle, and why the paper couldn’t cash in

By Zachary M. Seward

The Wichita Eagle’s Kansas.com was the 15th-most-visited American newspaper site in February, according to Nielsen Online. That’s remarkable, considering that the Eagle has never previously cracked the top 30.

What happened? A prominent link on Yahoo’s front page February 13 caused an astounding wave of traffic to the Eagle’s 389-word story about a student who caught an embarrassing error on the state writing test. (An essay prompt referred to “the omission of greenhouse gases,” enough to emit a scream from any orthographer.)

In a single afternoon, the Yahoo link sent roughly 3 million unique visitors to Kansas.com — which typically draws no more than 800,000 uniques per month, Nick Jungman, the site’s deputy editor for interactive news, told me today. That was enough to send the Eagle’s traffic numbers zooming past its rival three hours to the northeast, The Kansas City Star.

“All of a sudden,” he said, “we were just flooded.”

But while it was a banner day for the Eagle, it wasn’t particularly outstanding for the site’s banner advertising. The huge wave of Yahoo traffic generated just “a few thousand dollars” in extra revenue, according to Jungman.

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Conducting journalists: The Cedar Rapids Gazette in startup mode

By Martin Langeveld

Back in December, at my old blog, I posted a set of media predictions for 2009, including:  “Some innovative new approaches to journalism will emanate from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”

Around that time came the unveiling of Newsmixer, a project by Medill School of Journalism students working in collaboration with the Cedar Rapids Gazette.  Newsmixer, which has not progressed beyond a demonstration stage, is a concept for social networking around news, something the industry urgently needs to develop.

But Newsmixer came out in 2008, so it doesn’t count to fulfill my 2009 prediction. This does:

The Gazette’s Steve Buttry last week announced bold changes in the organization of the Gazette newsroom.  Buttry was editor of the paper, but that role has passed to Lyle Muller, and Buttry has assumed a newly coined title: Information Content Conductor.  I’m sure he’s the only guy in the country with that title right now.

The change is part of a broad and ongoing functional reorganization being led by Gazette Communications CEO Chuck Peters.  Chuck, you may recall, achieved some blogospheric fame last fall by liveblogging the American Press Institute’s Summit for an Industry in Crisis.  Unlike most news executives, his previous experience includes leadership of a completely different business — he was president and COO of Amana Refrigeration, the kitchen appliance firm.  He also has a law degree.  His background is a key reason Gazette Communications (which includes TV broadcasting and commercial printing divisions) is coming up with innovative new strategies for dealing with the challenges printed newspapers face.

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Owens: “The imperative of localism”

By Tim Windsor

For the past several years I’ve had a nagging suspicion that it would be the small community newspapers that would survive the bloodbath that is consuming our major metros, because they never lost focus of what we’ve recently taken to calling hyperlocalism. Howard Owens, late of Gatehouse, now of The Batavian, does an excellent job of attaching a why to that notion in an epic post that focuses first on what’s been lost at the metros:

Once people could no longer pick up the local gazette and find out who was visiting from California and when Helen Carter was going to sell her famous peach pies, the papers became less relevant to their lives.

Without that relevancy, society and democracy suffered. People became not only less informed, but less involved in their communities.

Consider that 57 percent of Americans say that if their local newspaper went away, both online and in print, they wouldn’t miss it and it wouldn’t hurt the civic life of their towns…

There is a nexus, I believe, between readership declines and less engaged communities that cannot be blamed entirely on the rise of radio and television nor on changes in urban-to-suburban lifestyles.

I recommend reading the whole post at Owens’ blog.