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.

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.

To Whom It May Concern:

I currently live in Springfield, Anystate. I work full time and am a part time student. I just had a gentleman stop by my house to offer me a FREE subscription to the Local Times for this semester and the only I would have to pay for is $.50/week to pay the deliverer. I kindly declined his offer because I am just not interested. I read my news online and I was just not interested in the offer. Here is how our conversation continued:

Seller: But you’re a student, right?

Me: Yes, but I’m just not interested.

Seller: But it is just $.50 a week. Fifty-cents!

Me: Thank you, but no thank you.

Seller: proceeded to share his head, turn to go down the stairs and then whistled (not a cheery tune, mind you, but a whistle that a person does when he just can’t believe something) and then he mumbled something

Me: Excuse me, sir, what did you say? Did you just say that I was retarded?

Seller: No, I said that people around here are retarded. Have a nice day.

Me: Sir!

Seller: Oh, don’t take offense. You’re not the only one. We usually only get 8 out of 10. Have a nice day.

Me: Get a life.

I am NOT impressed!! What kind of person is this? I’m afraid that I don’t even know his name and I’m not even sure if he works directly for you or if he works for the university. Either way, it reflects upon YOU. I just wanted to mention this so that if you knew of who it was you could possibly mention that that kind of service isn’t impressive.

Thank you for your time on this matter.

Sincerely,
Angelina Clinton

In my college days back in the 90s I used to photocopy my clips. I’m sure people still do that. Photocopying is easy — it’s just paper, getting copied to another piece of paper. Clips online? More complex. Caveat: I’m coming at this from a “I know a lot about online and this is what I would do if I were in this situation” angle, not a “I am a reporter looking for another job as a reporter and this is what I’ve found success in doing.”

There are two main ways to save your online work: saving the words, and saving how it looked.

Saving the words of your clips

This is useful in case you someday create an online portfolio of your work. It’s also useful for creating things like a PDF collection of your clips. Saving the words makes sure you don’t have to resort to scanning or retyping the printed version of your work just so you have something that plays nice on a computer. Go find your work. Select the text, copy it and paste it. If your article spans multiple pages, then the printer-friendly version is your friend. I would paste the text into a Microsoft Word or Open Office document, and save it. Make sure the date the piece was published is included in the information you save. If you have a lot of clips, I would save each in its own document. If you don’t, putting them all in one doc oughta be fine.

If there are photos, copy and paste the photos w/ captions into the Word doc, at the end of the article. If you’re technically inclined or a perfectionist, I recommend saving the photos to the folder you’re saving the documents with your words in them, adding the caption information to the file’s EXIF data, and using this naming convention for the photo: SLUGNAME20090114.jpg, where the date would be the publish date of the article.

Saving how your clip looked

This goes in tandem with the words, and it’s proof that some day in the future, after the NY Times is dead and gone, that you really did pen that piece for the NYT. The best way to prove this is to take a screenshot of your article. There is screenshot software out there, and I’ve used most of them. The best way to save a screenshot of a web page is the firefox browser plugin Pearl Crescent Pagesaver (note: if you don’t have firefox get it get it get it).  Pagesaver takes a shot of the entire page, not just the visible portion. It does a lot of other things. It’s free (though there is a paid version, with extra geek functionality). It made my screenshot-making life a panoply of rainbows and happiness.

I recommend keeping the filename pagesaver suggests, and prepend the filename with the year-month-date that the article ran (such as 20090114, if it ran January 14th of 2009). This makes it easier to sort and to find your screenshots.

Hope this helps,
Joe

When I visit PressDemocrat.com, I go for one thing: Sonoma County news. Someone in Mendocino County might visit the site for Mendo County news, which is great, but not the reason I visit. Ok, with that said, how do I locate Sonoma County news on PressDemocrat.com. Ahh… herein lies the problem. Local news granularity is sorely missing on the site.

When scrolling down PressDemocrat.com’s frontpage, you won’t find sections for “Santa Rosa news” or “Windsor news”

When I worked at the Winston-Salem newspaper, we had sections for each of the counties we covered, and I’m pretty sure we had feeds for each of them. One of our managers suggested getting rid of them — the traffic wasn’t particularly high to any one of the sections…. however, if you added the traffic to all of the county-based sections together, it was traffic worth considering.

And if you like that anecdote, I’ve got another. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, despite their “Closer To Home” slogan and (some say) general reputation for being more focused on the local, has no place-based online sections or place-based RSS feeds. The Denver Post, my employer, has both. The Post had place-based RSS feeds for the Denver Metro area before I started working there in October 2006.

I don’t get it — you’re a local news organization, you publish most of your information about a specific place on this planet, yet you do nothing to highlight, filter, or organize your place-based information? These city- / county- / neighborhood- / street- / block-based news feeds are just the tip of the location-based information iceberg. What can you do with a dateline? With a locator map? With a photo? A crime blotter? A classified ad? A banner ad? A calendar entry?

I wrote about some of this at the beginning of 2008 in this blog post, Three ways that online changes the “Where?” question, journalistically. I’m working on answers in my day-job, some of the time. If you’ve got ideas for a non-day-job project related to this, let me know.

Check out what he wrote about journalism and the internet, all the way back in 1999:

I do not consider the Internet – and generally the online medium – as a substitute to other media, but as a complement, a new channel of communication which takes its place alongside the others. I am going to position myself here as a journalist and an editor. Because it’s my original profession. Because it’s also the profession I am trying to re-invent (or more accurately, to learn again from scratch) since I have been doing it online. And mostly, because I firmly believe that journalists have an essential role to play in tomorrow’s interactive society and that they are quite wrong in fearing to become obsolete with the advance of the new media.

And this set of bullet points about things today’s journalists will have to deal with:

1. The behavior of online information seekers is very different than the traditional readers: some surf, some search.
2. Geography is no longer an issue.
3. We will have to think of a way to present our information so that it reaches both people and robots.
4. We will have to handle many different types of information that previously were not taken into consideration and which do not necessarily respond to the traditional definition of news: weather forecasts, traffic updates, sport results, real estate markets, transcripts of school board meetings, unedited documents, etc.
5. We will have to face new competitors coming from outside the field of publishing, using different approaches and different techniques.
6. We are going to witness an explosion in the media diversity. It would be incredibly naive to envision the future looking only at what we can see today – the computer as a plastic box with a screen and a keyboard.

Read the article, A New Media Tells Different Stories, here.

There were a few weeks at my last online news job where the CMS we used was consistently buggy. Sure, bugs happen. This bug happened because of a new RAM chip in one of the database servers has something wrong with its wiring, and was hosing that particular server. But, since there were multiple database servers, and when you were in the CMS doing your thing you weren’t always dealing the one that had something wrong with it, that problem didn’t happen all the time. When it did happen, pages would take 30-60 seconds to load. But it didn’t, and it was a hard problem for the developers to track down.

It’s difficult for non-web geeks to grasp everything that goes into making a website run, and it’s easy to complain when the tools you use don’t work perfectly. Thus, I give you my explanation of all the places things could go wrong when things go wrong. It’s not complete, because I don’t know everything. And it’s generic, which means different content management systems in different server environments may have issues with things that I’ve never heard of. It’s intended to help those not familiar with the ropes and pulleys behind the software used to publish their information understand what goes into those ropes and pulleys.

Note: I include a lot of links, some to some incredibly basic concepts. These links are intended to act as a glossary, because if you’re a computer / web noob and you don’t know the difference between a hard drive’s memory and RAM memory, or what HTTP means, it’s likely you will remain a noob. If I’ve made a big-wham omission / oversight / generalization, please do correct me.

1. The web servers.

Servers are computers. Kind of like the computer you’re on. Your computer isn’t designed to serve web pages — it’s designed to help you get the things you need to do done. Servers are built to serve files. Not you. That usually means servers are put in containers, stored next to other servers in giant tall racks, often in something called a “Data Center” far away from normal humans. Sometimes that data center’s in your building, and sometimes it’s not.

What can go wrong with a server?

Hardware. That means hard drive, RAM, power supply, CPU — any of those things could fail. It’s possible that the publishing you’re doing — especially if you’re involved in a high-traffic web site — involves more than one server. That’s because one computer can only deal with so many “requests.” (That’s the fancy term web professionals use for what happens when you go to a web page — you’re making a request for that HTML file, a request for that CSS file, a request for each of those images, etc.)

Recommended reading about servers

Wikipedia’s article about servers
Web Server Basics

2. The operating system.

Windows XP is an operating system. Mac OS X is an operating system. Linux has scads of different operating systems (called distributions). An OS is the visible layer between the server’s guts and the software that runs on ther server. I know I’m getting all fancy with the language here … bear with me, I’m writing this for the folk at the newsroom I work in.

What can go wrong with the operating system?

In the context of web publishing, not much. However, if some of the web software (or code on the web software) is insecure (read: vulnerable to attack), malicious software and people could leverage that vulnerability to take command of the OS and do nasty things.

Recommended reading about operating systems

Wikipedia’s article about Operating systems
Linux.org

3. The web server software.

In order to handle these requests made by the outside world for your web site, you need some software that knows what to do when it gets told “GET /tippler/Guestbook/guestbook.html HTTP/1.1? (that line is an example of one request your web browser makes when you visit a web page). Apache is the most-used server software on the web, as of April 2008.

What can go wrong with the web server software?

Configuration, and the stuff that happens when your site gets a traffic spike. Set up Apache wrong and Apache will start gobbling up your server’s RAM (RAM’s the stuff that provides the space for your computer’s programs, whether it’s Apache or Microsoft Word, to run. If your programs ask for more RAM than your computer / server can provide, that means your computer has reached the end of its limit and will probably start performing very slowly). Your server’s RAM won’t matter if 5 people visit your site each day, but if your site gets “spiked” (as in, a page on your site gets linked to by a high-traffic website, and all of a sudden you’ve got hundreds / thousands of people requesting pages every second) then your site could go down.

Recommended reading about web server software

Wikipedia’s article about web servers

4. The database.

Odds are most of the information on your site is stored in a database. There are many types of database software — Oracle, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL are a few of them.

What can go wrong with the database?

Most of what can go wrong with a database results from ineffeciencies and issuse with the back-end software / content management system (CMS) that’s asking the database for information. That said, if you’ve got a database that isn’t indexed / keyed properly (indexes and keys being the fields most often used by the back-end software to reference the information it’s looking for), you will have problems. Also, there’s the whole topic of caching database queries — the idea behind caching being that many of the same requests are made to the database, and instead of processing every request like it’s a new request why not save that information for later.

Recommended reading about databases

Wikipedia’s article about database management systems
Database Basics (slightly more technical)

5. The programming language that your content management system uses.

I’m talking about languages like PHP, Python, Ruby and Java, which are all often the language that the CMSes used to publish web sites are written in. These programming languages are also used to perform other tasks, but, here, we’re talking about them in their capacity to publish web sites. Why use a programming language? Because programming languages are a tool that allow you to repeat and perform common actions without you, yourself, actually doing them.

What can go wrong with the programming language?

There are things that can go wrong with the language, and there are things that can go wrong with the CMSes running on that software. It’s good to know that there’s a difference. The programming language isn’t as error-prone as the stuff that’s using the programming language to do whatever it is you’re doing on the web &emdash; that’s because there are legions of computer science professionals (and, often, corporations) working on that software. There are quality assurance and testing processes to make sure the software does what it’s supposed to, and doesn’t do what it’s not supposed to. Security is important in a programming language, because these languages can be made to do harm to the servers they’re on.

Recommended reading about programming languages

Index of the most-used programming languages
Wikipedia’s article about the front-end and the back-end of software

Read part 2 of What can go wrong with (the back end of) your web site, which looks at exciting topics such as what can go wrong with CMSes, external servers and Content Delivery Networks, vendor software / servers, and what can go wrong with you

Advice is cheap, and man is this future-of-newspaper problem producing a lot of it. Here is more.

I’ve written about potential products that can be added to news article pages before. That’s all well and good, but there are distinct problems with the article as a means of presenting information too (I have posts tangential to this topic in the Step Away From The Article category).

Article: Before

Taking this theme one step further, I pulled one of the breaking news articles from my employer’s web site today. Here it is, at the time I read it:

What’s distinct to me about this page, this piece of information, is how few links there are within the article.

Many newspapers, the Post included, realized the “Dead-End Article” was a problem online, and took a few steps to correct it. Many cases, the Post’s included, those steps seem to be founded on the “this is what else we can add to the page within our CMS’ constraints, and with little additional effort.” That often results in a list of articles directly related to the current article, a list of overall most’s (popular / discussed / emailed), and a list of recent news from that particular section. Those lists don’t address the possibility presented in the article information itself, which is what I focused on in my re-do of this article.

Article: After

Below is a mockup I made of that article page as it could live on the internet. It’s re-organized and includes additional context and information (all made up for the sake of example). It’s what I imagine would be a useful way to address the presentation of a piece of breaking news on a news organization’s web site. I’m not an awesome designer, and I didn’t want to work hard on the look-and-feel of this, because that’s not what this exercise is about.

Explanation

I didn’t “design” links into this mockup for one main reason: everything can be linked. Each statistic can link to more detail about the information it presents. Each piece of information I added is structured, and structured information is much easier to link with other like-minded pieces of structured information. Much easier to link means much less likely to be a dead-end. Less likely to be a dead-end means much more useful information. For more on this structured data stuff, read Adrian Holovaty’s classic A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change, as well as his article Dynamic News Stories.

What would be necessary to make this information presentation possible

News organizations already have the reporting muscle — that’s not the challenge. Breaking the information into re-usable pieces is. Getting specific is. To get specific, this is a high-level on what it would take to publish the information presented in that mockup:

• Creating archives of all the death-related news published takes people on the online production side.
• Creating the tools publishing county-related news lists takes web developers and online producers.
• Creating and maintaining statistic counts on deaths in a geographic region takes producers and librarians and reporters.
• Creating a means of dynamically publishing relevant statistic counts on news articles takes developers.
• Creating a way to integrate single-point locator maps into news articles takes developers.
• Creating a way to integrate themed multi-point maps into related articles takes developers. Creating and maintaining those maps takes producers and librarians and reporters.
• Creating a way to integrate specific related-news lists into articles takes developers.

It’s worth noting that with the exception of the statistics, all of this data is low-overhead data to produce. Adding an article about a death to a death-article list in a reasonable CMS would take about five to ten clicks, max. The major work is building the tools to allow for information to be published in this way.

Thoughts? Share them here.

Valentine’s Day: Before the 14th

• Got plans for Valentine’s Day?
  ( No, and I’m not making any / No, not yet / Yes / Yes! / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many Valentine’s Day cards are you writing?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )

Valentine’s Day: In General

• When was the last time you sent or received flowers?
  ( Inthe past week / The past month / the past year / the past three years / the past ten years / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How much do you believe in Valentine’s Day?
  ( None / A little / Some / A bit / A good amount / A lot / Tons / I don’t know / I don’t care )

Love

• How many people have you told “I love you” in your life?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many people have you told “I love you” in the past year?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many times have you been in love?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many times have you had your heart broken?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many hearts have you broken?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )

For those who are married

• Do you still believe in Valentine’s Day?
  ( No! / No / Yes / Yes! / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many times have you thought about leaving your spouse?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )