These are all my blog posts about newspapers with the Guardian, Telegraph, Mail and Express the main subjects. You should check out some of my other tags, such as newspaper paid links and my series looking at newspapers on twitter. I write about all aspects of what newspapers get up to, especially SEO, dodgy reporting, any stats relating to their online use and paywalls (or how they charge).
Want a job as SEO manager at the Daily Mail? Check out their robots.txt file (just don’t tell them you saw it here …) in the middle it says:
# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!
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As I’ve written elsewhere, there’s some confusion over at the Times marketing department about how the paywall works. The basic idea ought to be that if content is behind the Times paywall, people might pay for it. If it’s not, they won’t.
Before you agree to hand over your money, here are 11 bits of the new Times site you can access for free.
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iDosing is the made up internet craze where teenagers download digital drugs in the form of MP3 sound files and get high. Or something. I’m not making it up – the Sun and the Mail have reported it. The Mail got there first by an hour or so.
Now compare and contrast the reporting …
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There have been several attempts to work out how many people are paying to access the Times website now its gone behind a paywall. My estimate is: 46,154 a day. This is based on the number of comments on stories compared to other news sites.
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The Sun decided last week to run a story about the rumours circulating about Steven Gerrard. I don’t know what Gerrard’s lawyers made of this story but they might want to have a word with Google. If you get as far as typing Steven Gerrard into Google News, the auto complete function throws up this list …
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I usually try to avoid any discussion about the difference between blogging and journalism. But in Labour MP Tom Harris’s defence of newspaper paywalls, he draws a distinction, arguing that blogs are:
“amateur affairs, offering plenty of subjective opinion and the occasional interesting fact, spun in a particular direction.”
Which made me laugh. Substitute “professional” for “amateur” and you surely have the description of many newspapers …
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I was invited to a preview of the Times / Sunday Times paywall tonight, which revealed some interesting things they’re planning.
It also threw up a number of questions – which no doubt they’ll be mulling over before the new site goes live. The most difficult one for me is why users would want to pay for two different websites covering the same subjects?
Read the full post ...The Times and Sunday Times have made a video about its new paywall. Here it is.
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Google says it has “taken action” and no longer trusts links from a major UK newspaper group – apparently referring to the Daily Express website.
The Express and OK sites appeared to suffer page rank penalties in April – and Google has now confirmed it has taken action against a UK newspaper site.
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Mobile versions of websites – what a train crash they often are. As I write this, at 10.30pm on Monday night, neither the BBC nor Guardian mobile websites are mentioning that Gordon Brown has promised to resign … a story that their web news pages are unsurprising leading with – and have been doing so for several hours.
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I’m not quite sure why the Sun runs Sun Vote as it just ignores it (EG when its readers aren’t that fussed over a hung parliament). But its own on-site poll from last night about who won the debate (and unlike other sites, these aren’t easy polls to vote in – you have to go through a lengthy sign-up process) reveals that Clegg won.
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The Salisbury Journal has revealed that its “dog bumps nose” story (no, I’m not making this up) has received 130,000 page views. You’ll realise how extraordinary this is when your read the story …
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I got an email yesterday about what the Times will be offering once the paywall is up. Here’s a screenshot of the main bit.
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According to the Sun, a hung Parliament would be a disaster for Britain, while David Cameron “left his opponents reeling” in the second election debate.
The Sun’s online polls tell a different story.
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There was a story yesterday that the Express has been emailing SEOs selling links. I went over to the Express home page. And was fairly shocked to see it has a toolbar pagerank of just 4, which seems incredibly low for a newspaper site (er, it puts it on a par with my homepage toolbar pagerank!).
It definitely used to be higher than this.
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Since the first TV election debate, Nick Clegg has started to be taken seriously by the newspapers (or else has been the victim of a series of hatchet jobs, depending on your point of view).
The charts how the number of stories about Nick Clegg has soared in The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Guardian – even allowing for the fact general election is on.
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The News of the World has trumpeted a poll of mums claiming Cameron is “storming” into the lead. The figures show the opposite of this – read my dissection of the stats over at The Media Blog.
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Johnston Press is dropping the paywall on its local papers, with the number of subscribers said to be in single figures. People have already started to draw conclusions from this.
However, my view is that the Johnston Press experiment tells us precisely nothing about anything. The reason? Johnston Press had implemented its paywall in the worst way possible. All you can learn from this is that a paywall that makes no attempt to sell the content won’t sell any subscriptions.
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Adam Sherk recently pointed out that Twitter drives less than 1% of traffic to US newspaper and magazine sites (but noted that this still makes it “a top 25 referrer for all the [10 sites he asked] and top 10 referrers for most”).
Trying my luck somewhat, I asked people from the three largest UK newspaper sites (the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Guardian) what their figures were.
* For the Mail, under 0.5% of their referrer traffic is from Twitter.
* For the Telegraph, 0.5% of global traffic and 0.25% of uk traffic currently comes from twitter.
* For the Guardian, 0.4% of their page impressions in February came from Twitter.
I’ve blogged about Jan Moir and the PCC over at libdemvoice.org. Why not read it and leave a comment? Here’s a taste:
Second, the PCC is excusing what she wrote on the grounds that someone else had said it already. On this basis, newspapers can justify any factual inaccuracy as long as someone else said it first. What was Cowley supposed to do, track down the first journalist to wrongly claim Gately died alone and complain about them only?
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