July 5, 2007
Posted Notes
We'd love to be flies on the walls of newspaper boardrooms these days. The democratization of information on the internet threw the media companies for a loop, resulting in years of failed attempts to protect that information from the non-paying public. Sites like CNN wanted web readers to pony-up to see video clips, while the Hamilton Spectator previously made their website only accessible to subscribers. Like The New York Times, the Globe and Mail charges for archival articles and what they deem as "premium" content, though the Globe is more restrictive and expensive. As more readers turned to the web for their dose of news and commentary, newspapers were left sitting on rapidly shifting sands.
And then: the blog juggernaut (the bloggernaut?). Though most blogs continue to be narcissistic diaries filled with pictures of people's cats, there are those like Wonkette, Gawker and The Huffington Post which became immensely influential not only for linking to and commenting on alternative news, but because they allowed reader interaction. It was only relatively recently that the mainstream news sources, late to the party, scrambled to emulate the format and rein back-in their hemorrhaging young (and lucrative) demographic. Slapping the word "blog" on a series of short, repurposed web stories usually comes with mixed results when a media empire is behind it, and they don't do themselves any favours with uncreative and unwieldy monikers (like Starsportsblog, for example).
Which brings us to Posted Toronto; the brand-new city blog from the National Post.
A local version of the Post's recently launched national news blog Posted, corporate parent CanWest is placing Posted Toronto squarely in Torontoist territory, reporting on the tidbits of miscellany around Toronto that would normally fall outside of the mainstream news coverage. Not that we mind—we're up for some friendly rivalry (and after all, the Post is an advertiser of ours and some Torontoist staffers have worked there. We even think the paper version is quite good and gets a bad rap, mainly as a result of its former leadership by Lord Vader Black).
Whereas the Star's blogs seem like hobbled afterthoughts, Posted Toronto comes closer to understanding what a city blog is all about—a simultaneous mix of serious and frivolous observations with a focus on reader involvement. Granted, they likely aren't able to source photos and writers from the general public (as Torontoist does) lest they run afoul of the Newspaper Guild, but this is to their detriment. The images on Posted Toronto are small, bland and rarely striking, and are often of the file/stock photo variety. Great imagery like the destruction of the Lakeview Generating Station, has to compete with low-res snoozefest images of the Governor General, or more often, with repeating, oversized column nameplate icons that are barely distinguishable from each other. Unfortunately for Posted Toronto, it reinforces the staid image of its origin within the bowels of the Post mothership, along with its Canada.com/National Post redirected URL and page titles.
That's too bad, since the content is usually pretty good and appropriate enough for a blog format. In fact, some of the posts (and stories in the paper's The City section) are so good that they appeared a day or two before in Torontoist! To all you folks sitting in your Post cubicle reading this right now—we keed, we keed! And get back to work.
It's interesting to compare Sketch or Posted Toronto to scrappy little indies like Torontoist and BlogTO. The latter sites, where staff practically work for free, often have their ears closer to the ground and are sometimes able to post the stories before they appear in the mainstream media (the first photos of the ROM or the mobilization behind the Sam's sign, for example). And though we try to be accurate and fair, blogs like Torontoist also aren't hard-bound to a set of journalistic principles, which is why we can call Councillor Rob Ford a histrionic poopyhead who smells like rotting asparagus without having to call in the ombudsperson (in the interest of fairness, we have no idea if Rob Ford smells bad at all, despite his undeniable poopyheadedness).
Posted Toronto could also improve with a little more attitude, because you're nobody until your readers start sending you hate mail, or polarize into a mini-Middle East crisis in the article's comment section. Just ask us! Or Antonia Zerbisias. We'd have enjoyed some more explicit questions about waxing one's naughty bits, for example, and there's so much more douchebaggery that could have been pulled out of Jie's broke hairstylist ass.
Where the newspaper's blog excels, however, is in the harder news. Obviously. Their staffers at City Hall can get a nice, quick comment out of the Mayor or City Council, whereas we actually got our Nathan Phillips Square Redesign press kit given to—wait for it—the National Post reporter, who wanted an extra one (which is okay, 'cause who's coverage was better, suckas?). What ad agency do we have to employ to get some respect over at 100 Queen West, anyway?
Still, we relish the competition, and anything that gets Torontonians off their asses and motivated to care about our city is a good thing. Posted Toronto is a surprisingly solid initial effort. On their own "Toronto Index of Cool," we give them a +3.
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"Torontoist and BlogTO. The latter sites, where staff practically work for free..."
What evidence do you have that these other sites aren't also relying on "free" labour from people hanging around the office? Which is why the ideas have rarely lasted more than a few weeks...
Dude, if they're poorly-paid, Posted and Sketch should just fold and send their writers our way. We're awesome and poorly-paid!
So how much of this is Ron's influence? I'm glad I get to read him more often now :)
Not sure exactly what Ron's (ex-Torontoist editor) role is there, but my experience with the gang up there at the Post building has always been positive...they have a lot of people with good ideas. In relation to Torontoist, they're by far the most interactive and responsive to us out of all the big media companies, whereas some of the others like to pretend we don't exist, despite our 150,000 unique monthly readers. Whatevs. It's all good.
It's no surprise that even the most popular of blog format alt media web sites aren't acknowledged by the bigger newspapers. Blogs attract less than 1% of their readership.
"they have a lot of people with good ideas"
Are you that starstruck?
I thought the Post still had a bad rep because it's a rightwing kneejerk shit rag. Has that changed?
guest (#6): It's not being starstruck(!)—I'm just giving credit where credit is due. That doesn't mean that those "good ideas" necessarily get implemented. When I worked in the corporate world, people with good ideas were seen as a threat, or the company was too afraid to take any risks. The people at any place are usually great; it's the bureaucracy that sucks the soul out of the creative folks. Most people I've met who work at the Sun have been great, even if that have that particular character flaw. ;-)
guest (#5): Alt media sites are still taking readers away from the newspapers—especially the younger demographic. Readership of newspapers has drastically fallen, and they would love to have the blog readership. 150,000 blog readers is nothing to shake a stick at, and about 40% of Torontonians don't read a daily newspaper (and the National Post only has about 8% of that market).
rek: The Post is still the pretty right wing, but the bad rep comes mostly from the Southam days, when Conrad Black ran the thing and they had Blatchford and Frum writing their Conservative rabble-rousing columns. Now, it's a relatively slim paper with a focus on the financial, higher-income crowd, though they've notably increased their coverage of entertainment and lifestyle material, but they're their own worst enemy when it comes to change that stuffy perception.
I ended up with a free subscription for some mysterious reason at my office, so I was able to see how it had changed, and I was surprised that it was a lot better than I expected, particularly in how it's laid-out/designed. I had a hell of a time trying to cancel the subscription, though, since my office is locked at the time when the paper arrived so they left it on the ground and broadsheets would always be scattered around and blowing around the neighbourhood.
"150,000 blog readers is nothing to shake a stick at..."
150,000 readers? That would be a significant number if it were actually anywhere near 150,000 readers.
In truth you have more like 5000 blog readers when you divide your monthly uniques by 30 days. Then subtract all of your irregular readers, random Google hits, and hot (far reaching but here and gone) blog posts and you're probably down and around 3-4000 daily readers. Compare that to the any one of the Toronto daily paper readerships and it make sense that blogs are barely a blip on the radar.
Bad rep to you maybe, but Conrad's vanity press was paying people lots of money to do what the market has "corrected" back to zero, except for filling the gaps in Canwest's national sales strategy.
(Which just happen to be the two cities the Aspers call home: Toronto and Winnipeg.)
All the mainstream newspapers didn't start their own blogs just for shits and giggles...they saw people turning to the web—and blogs (i.e. my points about the Huffington Post and Gawker) and wanted some of that action. Newspapers aren't what they used to be, and that era isn't coming back.
"...the bad rep comes mostly from the Southam days, when Conrad Black ran the thing and they had Blatchford and Frum writing their Conservative rabble-rousing columns."
And don't forget Mr. Black's own "stirring" defence of Augusto Pinochet that was published in its pages.
But it still deserves its bad reputation. It's now controlled by the Aspers, who aren't any better about demanding that their papers print axe-grinding tripe. Is certifiable looney Terence Corcoran still editing its business section? I see that he is.
Marc, what would you say is Torontoist's core daily readership (i.e. the number of unique people)? Clearly it's less than 5000. By comparison, the National Post has a daily readership of over 500,000.
I agree that blogs are becoming highly influencial in shaping new media, but let's be real. Local blogs appeal mostly to a smaller number of local cityphiles (like ourselves). Real news is made by real newsmakers with reach that blogs don't come close to acheiving (yet).
guest (#13): Torontoist gets about 5000 uniques daily (sometimes more), and there are around 150,000 unique hits monthly. Page views are obviously drastically higher than that.
If you are using a disturbingly inaccurate tool like Alexa to question that, don't bother. Their stats—which are harvested from people who have installed the Alexa toolbar in IE6/7—are woefully and alarmingly inaccurate (notoriously so) and no reputable or informed site would tout Alexa stats as a measure of their success.
Something that blogs do that is also advantageous to mainstream media sites is link back to them, like we do in our daily news roundups, for example. More traffic for them. Remember that linking back to the newspaper's site is not just bringing traffic to the paper, but to the company's network (Canada.com, in the case of the Post), where they hope they stick around for their other services. I'm not sure, but I think Canada.com gets something like 3 million hits monthly, and that not only includes the Post, but other properties like Driving.ca and their other eleven newspapers.
Not using anything but math. 150,000/30 = 5000.
It somewhat varies, depending on where the traffic is coming from. For example, if we have an article hit Digg, we'll have many more uniques that month. Some days, like the weekend, have significantly less traffic for obvious reasons, and some days are much higher than 5000, but it averages out to around that. We could claim more traffic by splitting our articles unnecessarily and making people click to read another sentence or two, but that's annoying and tacky, and we only split them when they're too long for the front page. Ah, the wide world of the web...
Keep in mind, too, that those 5,000 unique visitors are not necessarily the same people every single day. We have a lot of people who read us only once a week, or twice a week, or several times daily. Our readership survey showed that 60% of our readership read us once a day or more (of course, those stats a little unreliable, since people who read us daily are more likely to answer our survey).
And, I mean, of course our readership is smaller than the Post's -- their staff is huge, far better-paid, and their newspaper boxes are scattered around the country. We rely pretty much solely on word-of-mouth. Not to mention that we are exclusively targeting a demographic one-tenth of a size of the Post's: people who live in the city of Toronto.
That said, in terms of relative success, we're on par with our parent company, Gothamist; they have ten times the traffic that we do in a city that is ten times our size. Before summer last year, we had less than half of the traffic that we do now. We welcome the competition, largely because The Post, as Marc has mentioned, has been really cool and nice to us (I mean, for one, they bought out advertising on us to promote their site).
I hereby grudgingly award the newspaper industry a half (1/2) kudo point for trying to get with the times, rather than suing customers for circumventing their business model.
Yeah, kudos to the NP for at least getting a decent looking blog format down.
(I just removed two rude -- or, at least, they seemed rude, but I could've gotten the tone wrong -- guest comments. If the person who left them wants to talk to me about the issue of censorship, they should e-mail me privately, or register an account on Torontoist and post here again so that I can e-mail them.)
Hmm...Torontoist has just been tipped-off that Sketch is now on hiatus. Will they be back? I'd guess no. Bring back Paved!