Re: Mass vs. Niche media
Donica wrote in the previous entry:
“we now measure clicks and know with certainty that what we thought people were interested in is rarely supported by the evidence.”
I would say the measure of clicks is widely useless in measuring reader salience for a few reasons (in some cases).
For one, a lot of important issues proliferate the Internet, so your millions of users are spread across an array of Web sites so that no one particular site gets a notable amount of clicks for the same story.
Two, linking and sharing don’t register on the click-o-meter. And especially quotations or relinks. If you’re a blogger and you’re aggregating or summarizing correctly, people don’t need to back track to your source material.
Three, I’ve found that most analytics *cough*Google*cough* are not accurate. For example, Google shows that the navigation on The Nevada Sagebrush site has zero clicks except the homepage and the Forum. This is not true because at the least, staffers use the navigation. Therefore, I’ve learned that Google Analytics don’t register literal clicks, it registers landing points and server queries. In the confusing WordPress architecture that is our web site, that’s not a good gauge of usability and only sometimes a good guage of readership.
Four, web headlines suck and the art of summaries and nutgrafs has been ignored and replaced by endless links of crap. Many of the “important” stories don’t even get a chance to be important. The use of obscure legal/political language and mid-story narratives makes them hard to search and drilldown. And with the swamp of breaking news, longer, community-relative stories are lost.
To say stories aren’t important to readers because of hits is to finish a math problem when you’re missing variables.
And five, on the Web you’re not going to see massive trends and readership on a story like you will with newspapers. I think the people analyzing these numbers for news are looking for the killer story that gets 50% of your readers clicking a story. And if you do, congratulations you’re damn good (that is if it’s unique hits).
In fact, I’d say if you’re doing your job as a community and public journalist you should be getting less hits because you’re writing for a niche audience that’s smaller. Of course, if you’re seeing less than 15 hits in a major market, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Just goes to show that technology is not a good gauge for much more than pure web design (and even then it’s not a great gauge). The best way to gauge a story is, as always, through communicating via web technologies and in person.