Someone wrote this on an article about Sam Zell and newspapers: “The biggest single thing holding [newspapers] back right now is the monopoly mentality that pervades sales, marketing and editorial at most big papers.”

Do you agree?

More meaningful metrics would translate visitor interest, disinterest and loyalty into numbers that can be viewed as a whole and within the context of particular site content types, classifications or products (home page, article page, sections, photos, photo galleries, data ghettoes, etc.).

Even more meaningful metrics would measure all of the above among visitors from the particular local news site’s circulation area. In the case of my employer, that’s specifically Denver, and generally Colorado. Forty percent of our site visitors come from Colorado, and that number’s rising, which is good. But those numbers don’t tell what the churn rate is, or what percentage of our Colorado visitors are repeat-daily visitors, or how the repeat-daily number has changed over time.

This is an incomplete list of meaningful metrics for a local online news site, written in the context of a Denver Colorado online news site:

• What non-branded search terms are Coloradans using to find our site content? Once they come, who stays for a second click, and what search terms result in the most second-clicks? What search terms result in the fewest second-clicks?
• What’s the return frequency of Coloradans? Among Denver residents? Among Aurora residents? How has that number changed over time?
• Which sections (news / sports / business / entertainment) have the highest percentage of visits from Coloradans? Are any sections declining in that number? Is that decline a seasonal issue or is it longer lasting?
• What’s the bounce rate among visitors who enter at articles? Does that change based on the section the article’s in? Does that change based on whether it’s a Colorado visitor? How has that rate changed over time?
• What’s your homepage bounce rate among visitors who arrived at your homepage for the first time today? What’s the rate among visitors who have already visited your homepage today? How does that number change over time?
• This is something that is more difficult to measure: How many readers make it to the end of an article? Some javascript that hooks into the y-position of the last paragraph and measures that against the scroll of the window would be necessary to get into this metric, and even then it wouldn’t be wholly accurate (the bigger the browser window, the shorter the article, the less accuracy)

Note: All of these metrics, and any metrics at all, become much more useful when keeping a site log of incidents (breaking news, special projects) and site changes.

Got any more metrics to add? Share ‘em below.

Two weeks ago I was talking with Dan Petty (our online intern at the Denver Post) about a Drudge Report link to our site from the week before. That link, and the words used in that link, had made this denverpost.com article a top-3 result on Google if you were to search for people shouting.

Another article on our site, Debunking Canadian health care myths, has been getting steady traffic, fed by links posted every so often on trafficked site, since June 7. I was curious how it placed in searches for Canadian health care. It wasn’t a first-page result. However, a CommonDreams.org page that had cut and paste (i.e. stolen) the Denver Post article in its entirety was the #7 result. Good for them? Not so much, though the Post is not the only ones who get ripped off by Common Dreams.

Anyway. I contacted Common Dreams about this, and they were nice enough to trim their copy of our article down to five paragraphs. And what happened next is what I find the most interesting bit of this: Within two days of Common Dreams trimming down their article, the Denver Post’s version of Debunking Canadian health care myths was the #7 result in Google in searches for Canadian health care. It’s not anymore, but it was.

What this means:

• Google’s algorithm tries to figure out the original source of an article, and just because a cut-and-paste article links to the original doesn’t put it out of the competition. If you have the full article, and you have more links to your version of the article and a higher page rank, Google will likely think that you’re the source. Despite a Common Dreams link to the Denver Post’s article with this text “Published on Sunday, June 7, 2009 by The Denver Post,” Google still decided to post the Common Dreams article in the first-page results.
• Wholesale cut-and-pasting of your content is probably worth addressing. Well, sort of. If you’re a local newspaper, those eyeballs from outside your circulation area aren’t so valuable to your advertisers. They will also skew your numbers (see Gerry McGovern’s Volume is the wrong way to measure web success. However, taking search engine ownership of phrases central to your coverage is a goal often overlooked by local news orgs, and addressing copy-and-paste-cats is a prong of a healthy search engine strategy.

If you have any real-life examples of Google’s search algorithm at work, do share.

(thanks, @conarroe)

That saying was about the two types of knowledge:

There is knowledge that you know, and there is knowledge that you know where to look to find.

Thinking about that now I can imagine a third:

What you think you know, but don’t.

And a fourth:

What you think you know where to find on the web, but which has since disappeared from that location and is no longer in google’s cache.

We don’t know where our online headlines will end up. Our article headlines are what the search engines use to figure out what we’re talking about. In print, you have all sorts of context. Online your context is not guaranteed. The headline is the most-often piece of linked text, which means it’s got to be able to stand by itself in the middle of nowhere dot com and still make sense.

With that in mind, here are some tips on making headlines work better on the web. The examples included are from the morning’s headlines on denverpost.com, and all of them have since been fixed (thanks, Demetria):

Use place names and people names as often as possible.

Labels like “city” and “state” should never be a headline’s only word used to describe location. Be specific. Column widths don’t control your pen like they did in the past.

• Example: “Growers cheer as rains put state totals near norm” works much better when it’s “Growers cheer as rains put Colorado totals near norm”
• Ex: “Police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” makes no sense on its own, “Montrose police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” helps a little more.
• Ex: “More farmers losing hope” could apply to farmers anywhere in the world. “More Colorado farmers losing hope” fixes that.
• Ex: “Justice not on city’s to-do list” could apply to any city. “Justice not on Denver’s to-do list” makes it clear which on we’re talking about.
• Ex: “Lottery a loser in current economy.” — “Colorado lottery a loser in current economy”
• Ex: “Star’s status does affect at-risk kids” — “Brandon Marshall’s star status does affect at-risk kids”

Abbreviations make sense to us, and the people who are familiar with us. They may not make sense to search engines, or the non-Denver Post lingo savvy.

• Example: ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Springs’ — ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Colorado Springs’ is much more explicit about the location, and that this happened in Colorado.
• Ex: ‘No doubt Nugs are for real’ is not hard to turn into ‘No doubt Nuggets are for real’

Puns are nonsense, and explicit trumps cutesy 95% of the time.

Here are some cutesy heds — try imagining if you saw those links on a list of headlines, and whether you have enough information about what’s on the other side of that click to consider making that click.

• Example: “High dudgeon — and other bits”
• Ex: “Hard slog on dimes and nickels”
• Ex: “Heart was dialed in on caring”
• Ex: “Forget that game, but not this team”

Watch out for label headlines.

If you have a label headline, often there’s a subhead, and often that subhead is what should be the headline online.

• Example: “Facebook time travel” — this one had a great subhead, “Old friends are new again using social networking — from the comfort of their own laptop”. There are a couple ways to approach this rewrite, and “Facebook time travel: Old friends are new again using social networking” gets the point across best.
• Ex: “Hoop Dreams” could have easily been “Hula Hoop Dreams: A rigorous workout with meditative benefits puts a new spin on an old toy”

If you’ve got any more resources about writing headlines for online, or suggestions, add ‘em in the comments below.

Reading this followed my discovery of the Kankakee Daily Journal’s site, which allows comments on the two or three grafs of articles they provide online — the rest of the word-based news is tucked behind the pay e-edition wall.

I’m asking myself: Is PDF-style delivery really the future of newspapers? The e-edition PDFs are attractive to newspapers — they look like the print edition, and they contribute to print-circ numbers. But they also ignore the possibilities of online advertising, which is a glaring problem with many newspaper-dot-coms.

Have newspaper execs who make those decisions learned anything in the last decade? Geez, they’ve hired expert tradesmen to run the printing presses for years. Along comes the Internet and they won’t hire enough tech experts to maintain and innovate as a Gutenberg moment in history slams into them and which requires major adaptation.’

–Steve Outing, posted on the Online News listserv

I’ve got one angle, it’s not very good but it’s what I had in my head tonight: Find out who’s downloading and saving the articles you publish on your site. Groups and organizations do this — often they’re government orgs, putting together information for their employees. Your news org doesn’t get anything when they’re saving your stuff to their servers, but, if your news org provided a service that put this news together for them on your site, and charged for that service, those organizations wouldn’t have to spend the time looking for that data, and your news org wouldn’t lose the page views to the people pulling your content for their own uses.

Here’s a better riff on the “news concierge” angle (because, honestly, who knows the information you publish better than you do?): Law firms often have to look up specific information. Many times they call newsrooms looking for that information online. What are newsrooms doing answering those phone calls for free? No, what we need is an information retainer fee. No questions asked or answered until the law firm (or, heck, pr firm) pays up. This is a service a newsroom library could provide.