Archives: January 7, 2010

 

Keeping Martin honest: Checking on Langeveld’s predictions for 2009

By Martin Langeveld

[A little over one year ago, our friend Martin Langeveld made a series of predictions about what 2009 would bring for the news business — in particular the newspaper business. I even wrote about them at the time and offered up a few counter-predictions. Here's Martin's rundown of how he fared. Up next, we'll post his predictions for 2010. —Josh]

PREDICTION: No other newspaper companies will file for bankruptcy.

WRONG. By the end of 2008, only Tribune had declared. Since then, the Star-Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Journal Register Company, and the Philadelphia newspapers made trips to the courthouse, most of them right after the first of the year.

PREDICTION: Several cities, besides Denver, that today still have multiple daily newspapers will become single-newspaper towns.

RIGHT: Hearst closed the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (in print, at least), Gannett closed the Tucson Citizen, making those cities one-paper towns. In February, Clarity Media Group closed the Baltimore Examiner, a free daily, leaving the field to the Sun. And Freedom is closing the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, which cuts out a nearby competitor in the Phoenix metro area. Keep reading »

6 months, 3 weeks ago 1 comment

To grow, Gawker turns its attention to unique users

Gawker Media’s web measurement of choice is shifting from pageviews to unique users. That’s a pretty big deal for an organization that led the charge in pageview obsession. Gawker founder Nick Denton explained the refocusing in a staff memo:

The target is called “US monthly uniques.” It represents a measure of each site’s domestic audience. This is the figure that journalists cite when judging a site’s competitive position. It’s also the metric by which advertisers decide which sites they will shower with dollars. Finally, a site with plenty of genuine uniques is one that has good growth prospects. Each of those first-time visitors is a potential convert.

Gawker wants to expand its audience, and in the web world that often means launching new sites targeting different audiences. That’s not the case here: Gawker has sold properties, rolled others into its flagship and cut staff in recent years.

So how will Gawker grow amidst consolidation? By focusing efforts on scoops and original content; the stuff that spreads like wildfire through Twitter and Digg. “What is new is our feeling that we have tapped out our existing core audiences, and need to incentivize writers to find the next million people,” Denton wrote in an email. And as our colleague Zach Seward pointed out on Twitter a few days ago, the most popular Gawker posts are disproportionately the ones with original reporting.

The memo points out four stories that fit this new mindset: Keep reading »

6 months, 3 weeks ago 4 comments