stedavies.com - communications consultant

Last week I had a brief scan over the Wikipedia entry for my favourite media outlet, The Guardian. Further down the page it has a summary of the newspaper’s ‘online media’ section and mentions that a third of its website’s hits are for articles over a month old. Now think about that for a second. Old (and no doubt outdated) news accounts for a third of the Guardian’s traffic.

The Wikipedia entry links to a piece by Emily Bell (written in the Guardian of course) who backs this up by giving an example of a story which was added to the Guardian’s sister site, The Observer, about missing armed dolphins (not frickin’ sharks with frickin’ lazer beams btw) trained by the US military following Hurricane Katrina.

Bell says: “On the Sunday Flipper appeared in the paper the story won 25,000 impressions; on Monday it attracted a further 484,000; and to date it has picked up 915,000. Once you put a story into cyberspace it acquires a life of its own, well beyond the moment of publication. Flipper was Drudged – that is, he appeared on the US site the Drudge Report, which points people towards the quirkiest and most scurrilous stories on the web. From there one blog after another picks the curious item up and passes it on until the cumulative effect is as great as a major breaking news story.”

It also reminded me of a post written by Antony Mayfield after he had spoke to the automotive industry’s PR group MIPAA. He mentioned quotes from another speaker, the group editor for What Car?, Steve Fowler who claims that the publication gets 900,000+ visitors a week to whatcar.com and 127,000 readers a month to the magazine. “But people still think that the magazine is much more valuable to be in.”

Looking at my own stats this post still drives a lot of traffic to my blog. In fact in terms of hits is the most popular post I’ve written. And even though it was written in mid June, the last comment I received was late November. Google Analytics tells me that people are landing on this particular post using the keywords “public relations campaign”, “pr campaign”, “public relations campaign example”, “steps of a PR program” I could go on. Jeeze, I’m even number 6 in Google.com for people searching using the famous PR theorists, Grunig and Hunt as keywords.

My point is this. News in a dead tree publication is there for, at most, a couple of days. Then it’s off to be recycled and turned into new news. Whereas news online is recycled in a whole different way – it’s a recycling of the same news. Plus it’s searched for (I.e. the eyeballs it comes in range with actually want to read it) therefore making it more relevant to the end user.