When I was in San Francisco for ONA, a kind reader offered a blunt critique of my reporting: “You know, every time The New York Times sneezes, it isn’t news.” He’s right, and yet, here’s another post in which the Gray Lady clears her nose: Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor who’s becoming a regular around here, delivered a newsroom address on Thursday that touched on layoffs, efficiency, and charging for NYTimes.com. Keep reading »
From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and clickthrough rates. (“You should follow me on Twitter” produced dramatically better results than the less moralizing, “Follow me on Twitter.”)
So here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.
Headlines have always played the most promotional role in news, charged with selling readers on the articles they adorn, so it only makes sense to apply the best tools of market research to their crafting. Think of it as a more rigorous version of magazines adjusting their covers based on newsstand sales. Keep reading »
We’re recapping this weekend’s Online News Association conference through the lens of Twitter — assembling the most interesting or useful tweets from each session. I posted recaps of Friday’s sessions yesterday; here are Saturday’s.
Among the topics covered: the social context of retweeting; why Twitter won’t boost your SEO; a Spanish Twitter-like tool for journalists; and the role of Scotch in journalism startups. You’ll also find two of the biggest (and, to my mind, successful) sessions of the weekend: “From Journalist to Entrepreneur” at 10 a.m. and “Design Solutions from News Experts” at 2:30 p.m.
As I mentioned yesterday, if you’re interested in additional information about any panel, you can search Twitter for its hashtag (in parentheses after the panel’s title). And check out the ONA schedule page, which is adding copies of many of the presentations made by the panelists. Keep reading »
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