7 ms·

Salon publishes 33% fewer articles, traffic grows 40%

144 points by bproper 15y ago

oacgnol 15y ago
Salon articles are constantly on the top feeds in Pulse News for me, and they're usually quite compelling. I've never regretted reading any of their articles.
ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
please let this catch on please let this catch on The AOL-ification of journalism has gotten ridiculous over the last few years. It would be really nice to see content go towards Quality over Quantity.
- jseliger 15y ago
 It does: get subscriptions to The Atlantic or The New Yorker to see examples of this in action.
amitparikh 15y ago
David Simon, the co-creator of HBO's The Wire and former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, speaks eloquently during a PBS interview by Bill Moyers on the demise of print journalism over the past 20 years and the loss of "1st generation reporting". (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNc5y7lpYA&t=8m10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNc5y7lpYA&t=8m10s) It's certainly uplifting to see that online journalism has something of a light at the end of the tunnel. It's just my personal experience, but I find the shift towards "long-reads," particularly by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other similar publications, to be a great boon to the people of the world. Is it so hyperbolic to say that "1st generation" journalism is as important to society as democratic government? I don't think so. Either way, I'm glad that Salon has published this data to show that there is another way (a better way?). If you look at all the lemmings that simply followed the "quick-hits" journalism that Kerry Lauerman is talking about in this blog post, no one 5 years ago had the guts to turn the model upside down. I'm very glad and grateful that we are making progress to getting to a point where "1st generation" journalism can be found -- and will be sought after -- in online media.
- mbesto 15y ago
  Totally agree. Salon, The Atlantic, and New Yorker always have very good content. I never read the print version of Atlantic, but ever since they did a complete transformation to web, I've realized the quality of their journalist is really quite outstanding.
- otakucode 15y ago
  If that which the newspapers and television news agencies did was "1st generation reporting", what would actual transmission of newsworthy information be? 0th generation? I mean, for instance, providing a live video feed or a riot, or videos taken by those in attendance, rather than a reporter talking about the event hours or days later. The video of Gaddhafi being killed, not the reporters seeking to let people know what happened without risking giving offense to any viewers? It's not particularly relevent to Salon, but I'd prefer to see 'news' be reduced to uncommented raw feeds of actual video, with absolutely minimal editing. Show people what is happening. As soon as you 'explain' what is happening, regardless of intent, you introduce all sorts of biases and preconceived notions and the like. I would certainly like to see the continuation of long-form well-researched journalism of the past, which takes the raw news items and correlates them, provides context and meaning, etc, but I think that should be separate from 'news' reporting. It is article writing, which has been important in society for ages. Even though it was originally created due to the technological limitation of not being capable of finding original raw material, it does add significant value so it makes sense to keep it. However, any medium like this responds to social trends. Society has been trending anti-intellectual for over 50 years with no sign of slowing. People do not want to stop and think, they do not want to be exposed to news that jars them out of their comfort zone. They do not want to read about ideas different from their own. They certainly do not want any analysis of the ideas they do hold as true, they see that as attack. A big help to long-form journalism would be moving away from the concept of central agencies that employ these reporters. What do those agencies provide? Nothing. They used to aggregate reporters together, give them access to technological resources, editors, etc. All of that can be done by some software with an Internet connection. Take the entire revenue of one of those large agencies, and provide it directly to the reporters (they can contract freelance editors online without much trouble). See what kind of quality gets produced then.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
chintan 15y ago
Salon: 5 million http://www.quantcast.com/salon.com http://www.quantcast.com/salon.com Huff Po: 70 million http://www.quantcast.com/huffingtonpost.com http://www.quantcast.com/huffingtonpost.com Just sayin'
- rossriley 15y ago
  You have to cross reference that against quality though. In these days of content farms high traffic does not necessarily correlate against high value. If the higher quality of writing and audience attracts a more attractive advertiser audience Salon could get much higher CPM rates without having the same volume.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    HuffPo is definitely straddling the content-farm fence.
codelust 15y ago
Unrelated, but relevant point to the discussion: pay for good long form content. It costs quite a bit to produce it. If you love it, buy it. I have worked almost a decade in the online media industry in my previous life and I don't find this particularly surprising. Somewhere around 2005, everyone in the industry discovered this major obsession with doing stories based on SEO, than doing stories that did well on their own merit. Unfortunately, everyone jumped onboard with this idea as it made sense at scale. Fortunately, half-a-decade down the line, we seem to be waking up to the fact that not everyone can make a living at scale; only a few can accomplish the scales to justify that. The others have to focus on quality, than quantity, to bring them the traffic. The other unspoken part of the content business is that a tiny minority of the people who matter in the business actually understand the numbers. Most don't understand anything beyond total pageviews and then starts the hunt to increase them at any cost. The dumbest way to increase pageviews is to do more stories, but they often don't understand the fact that doing more stories don't come for free and that each story is not as productive as the other in getting them more traffic. Quality works, but quality is not easy. It is hard work, time-consuming and there are no quick fixes.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jonnathanson 15y ago
  I truly believe that quality will win out over quantity in the long run. The race to churn out SEO-based, high-volume, crap-quality content farms represented the first phase in online journalism. It was a race to the bottom. Sure, that race had some early winners. But the race has been run. The bottom has been hit. There's no more profit to be reaped there, and besides, the model makes less and less sense vis-a-vis today's internet. That's because the future of the mass content aggregation business now belongs to Facebook, and to other social networking services yet to come. Aggregation websites are going to look very anachronistic in the coming years, while content-specialist sites will have to differentiate on subject matter and on quality. So what does this mean for content producers? Well, it's no longer about mass aggregation of cheaply produced crap. It's now about being a high-quality producer, whose content is more likely to get pickup up ("earned," in media parlance) by Facebook users, as well as by Google's increasingly sophisticated ranking algorithms. Thoughtful pieces will matter. Well-written pieces will matter. It's not easy, and there's no guarantee that it'll be profitable. And unfortunately, the advertisers will be monetized by the aggregation layer (Facebook, most likely) on which content producers will depend. So that leaves pay-gates and subscriptions, both of which can be circumvented, and which are often loathed by readers. But however the winning business model gets figured out, quality will almost certainly play a crucial role in it.
hristov 15y ago
Unfortunately, the quality has really gone down. Five years ago, I used to read Salon every day. They used to have very interesting well researched and well thought out articles. Nowadays Salon is progressively obtaining the qualities associated with a bad blog. A lot of half thought out articles, a lot of lazy opinion pieces, a lot of random bitching about how this or that is sexist, practically no attempt to obtain first hand information, just regurgitating popular culture and what appeared on Gawker two hours prior, movie reviews that sheepishly praise the latest idiotic big budget movies. Oh and I read a book review where a reviewer panned a book she had not read. So yeah, pretty depressing.
- ceol 15y ago
  > a lot of random bitching about how this or that is sexist Just thought I'd point out the humor in you using a gendered word to describe their tendency to talk about sexism.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    - ceol 15y ago
      Its original root is "female dog", but the verb "to bitch", meaning "to complain", has its roots in the pejorative, gendered insult. Hopefully this isn't too off-topic.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    Are gendered words inherently sexist? E.g., is "He"/"She" sexist now?
    - TruthElixirX 15y ago
      Gendered words aren't sexist (he/she), they are descriptive in the same way that black/white are. Bitching is the (sort of) equivalent of the word niggardly. Niggardly has no etymological roots with nigger, but they sound similar and niggardly means stingy/miserly/has negative connotations. Lets pretend for a second that they are derived from the same root (They're not but I lack a better example off the top of my head). Saying black would not be the same as saying niggardly.
geargrinder 15y ago
Since Google changed their algorithms to deal better with web spam and useless articles, even blackhatters and web spammers know that you have to serve useful content to get search engine traffic. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-sea... Also, how much of this traffic increase has to do with the election, since Salon is a site that runs a lot of political stories? It is good they are seeing more traffic with fewer, better articles, but 2 months of record traffic in an election year would be expected of a political site. What will be their explanation in a year after the election is over and their traffic falls? He specifically mentioned there were no outlier events that drove traffic, but is that really true? The Republican debates and early primaries have been dominating most news outlets for a few months now. It certainly drives the stories on Salon today. Understanding what drives traffic, whether it be events, advertising, trends, etc., is essential to craft a content strategy that works in the long run. I do believe longer, engaging, original stories are good for the user, whether they are scanning or reading the entire article. They are good for SEO too. It will be interesting to see what happens with Salon's traffic and their new-found commitment to better content.
MichaelApproved 15y ago
"Short (a few hundred words) summaries or explainers about a major news event covered more in depth by somebody else. In its best form, we wrote short little decoders of a big story, and tried to link generously to the original source." I think there's a place for this, if done well. My startup lets the community summarize popular stories with an emphasis on being short, unsensationalized and to the point. This means we sacrifice Google traffic but I prefer to consume most news like this and I know there are others who feel the same. Of course, there are times you want a deep dive but that's when you go to Slate, NY Times and the like. If you're interested, it's http://skimthat.com http://skimthat.com Edit: This is kind of similar to Open Salon but with a very narrow focus on the type of writing: summarized news in a dry, direct way with no puns or jokes. The stories should be as short as possible while giving the reader a good understanding of the topic.

144 points by bproper 15y ago

Salon articles are constantly on the top feeds in Pulse News for me, and they're usually quite compelling. I've never regretted reading any of their articles.

ChrisNorstrom 15y ago

please let this catch on please let this catch on The AOL-ification of journalism has gotten ridiculous over the last few years. It would be really nice to see content go towards Quality over Quantity.

jseliger 15y ago
It does: get subscriptions to The Atlantic or The New Yorker to see examples of this in action.

amitparikh 15y ago

David Simon, the co-creator of HBO's The Wire and former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, speaks eloquently during a PBS interview by Bill Moyers on the demise of print journalism over the past 20 years and the loss of "1st generation reporting". (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNc5y7lpYA&t=8m10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNc5y7lpYA&t=8m10s) It's certainly uplifting to see that online journalism has something of a light at the end of the tunnel. It's just my personal experience, but I find the shift towards "long-reads," particularly by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other similar publications, to be a great boon to the people of the world. Is it so hyperbolic to say that "1st generation" journalism is as important to society as democratic government? I don't think so. Either way, I'm glad that Salon has published this data to show that there is another way (a better way?). If you look at all the lemmings that simply followed the "quick-hits" journalism that Kerry Lauerman is talking about in this blog post, no one 5 years ago had the guts to turn the model upside down. I'm very glad and grateful that we are making progress to getting to a point where "1st generation" journalism can be found -- and will be sought after -- in online media.

mbesto 15y ago
Totally agree. Salon, The Atlantic, and New Yorker always have very good content. I never read the print version of Atlantic, but ever since they did a complete transformation to web, I've realized the quality of their journalist is really quite outstanding.
otakucode 15y ago
If that which the newspapers and television news agencies did was "1st generation reporting", what would actual transmission of newsworthy information be? 0th generation? I mean, for instance, providing a live video feed or a riot, or videos taken by those in attendance, rather than a reporter talking about the event hours or days later. The video of Gaddhafi being killed, not the reporters seeking to let people know what happened without risking giving offense to any viewers? It's not particularly relevent to Salon, but I'd prefer to see 'news' be reduced to uncommented raw feeds of actual video, with absolutely minimal editing. Show people what is happening. As soon as you 'explain' what is happening, regardless of intent, you introduce all sorts of biases and preconceived notions and the like. I would certainly like to see the continuation of long-form well-researched journalism of the past, which takes the raw news items and correlates them, provides context and meaning, etc, but I think that should be separate from 'news' reporting. It is article writing, which has been important in society for ages. Even though it was originally created due to the technological limitation of not being capable of finding original raw material, it does add significant value so it makes sense to keep it. However, any medium like this responds to social trends. Society has been trending anti-intellectual for over 50 years with no sign of slowing. People do not want to stop and think, they do not want to be exposed to news that jars them out of their comfort zone. They do not want to read about ideas different from their own. They certainly do not want any analysis of the ideas they do hold as true, they see that as attack. A big help to long-form journalism would be moving away from the concept of central agencies that employ these reporters. What do those agencies provide? Nothing. They used to aggregate reporters together, give them access to technological resources, editors, etc. All of that can be done by some software with an Internet connection. Take the entire revenue of one of those large agencies, and provide it directly to the reporters (they can contract freelance editors online without much trouble). See what kind of quality gets produced then.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

chintan 15y ago

Salon: 5 million http://www.quantcast.com/salon.com http://www.quantcast.com/salon.com Huff Po: 70 million http://www.quantcast.com/huffingtonpost.com http://www.quantcast.com/huffingtonpost.com Just sayin'

rossriley 15y ago
You have to cross reference that against quality though. In these days of content farms high traffic does not necessarily correlate against high value. If the higher quality of writing and audience attracts a more attractive advertiser audience Salon could get much higher CPM rates without having the same volume.
- rhizome 15y ago
  HuffPo is definitely straddling the content-farm fence.

codelust 15y ago

Unrelated, but relevant point to the discussion: pay for good long form content. It costs quite a bit to produce it. If you love it, buy it. I have worked almost a decade in the online media industry in my previous life and I don't find this particularly surprising. Somewhere around 2005, everyone in the industry discovered this major obsession with doing stories based on SEO, than doing stories that did well on their own merit. Unfortunately, everyone jumped onboard with this idea as it made sense at scale. Fortunately, half-a-decade down the line, we seem to be waking up to the fact that not everyone can make a living at scale; only a few can accomplish the scales to justify that. The others have to focus on quality, than quantity, to bring them the traffic. The other unspoken part of the content business is that a tiny minority of the people who matter in the business actually understand the numbers. Most don't understand anything beyond total pageviews and then starts the hunt to increase them at any cost. The dumbest way to increase pageviews is to do more stories, but they often don't understand the fact that doing more stories don't come for free and that each story is not as productive as the other in getting them more traffic. Quality works, but quality is not easy. It is hard work, time-consuming and there are no quick fixes.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jonnathanson 15y ago
I truly believe that quality will win out over quantity in the long run. The race to churn out SEO-based, high-volume, crap-quality content farms represented the first phase in online journalism. It was a race to the bottom. Sure, that race had some early winners. But the race has been run. The bottom has been hit. There's no more profit to be reaped there, and besides, the model makes less and less sense vis-a-vis today's internet. That's because the future of the mass content aggregation business now belongs to Facebook, and to other social networking services yet to come. Aggregation websites are going to look very anachronistic in the coming years, while content-specialist sites will have to differentiate on subject matter and on quality. So what does this mean for content producers? Well, it's no longer about mass aggregation of cheaply produced crap. It's now about being a high-quality producer, whose content is more likely to get pickup up ("earned," in media parlance) by Facebook users, as well as by Google's increasingly sophisticated ranking algorithms. Thoughtful pieces will matter. Well-written pieces will matter. It's not easy, and there's no guarantee that it'll be profitable. And unfortunately, the advertisers will be monetized by the aggregation layer (Facebook, most likely) on which content producers will depend. So that leaves pay-gates and subscriptions, both of which can be circumvented, and which are often loathed by readers. But however the winning business model gets figured out, quality will almost certainly play a crucial role in it.

hristov 15y ago

Unfortunately, the quality has really gone down. Five years ago, I used to read Salon every day. They used to have very interesting well researched and well thought out articles. Nowadays Salon is progressively obtaining the qualities associated with a bad blog. A lot of half thought out articles, a lot of lazy opinion pieces, a lot of random bitching about how this or that is sexist, practically no attempt to obtain first hand information, just regurgitating popular culture and what appeared on Gawker two hours prior, movie reviews that sheepishly praise the latest idiotic big budget movies. Oh and I read a book review where a reviewer panned a book she had not read. So yeah, pretty depressing.

ceol 15y ago
> a lot of random bitching about how this or that is sexist Just thought I'd point out the humor in you using a gendered word to describe their tendency to talk about sexism.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - ceol 15y ago
    Its original root is "female dog", but the verb "to bitch", meaning "to complain", has its roots in the pejorative, gendered insult. Hopefully this isn't too off-topic.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Are gendered words inherently sexist? E.g., is "He"/"She" sexist now?
  - TruthElixirX 15y ago
    Gendered words aren't sexist (he/she), they are descriptive in the same way that black/white are. Bitching is the (sort of) equivalent of the word niggardly. Niggardly has no etymological roots with nigger, but they sound similar and niggardly means stingy/miserly/has negative connotations. Lets pretend for a second that they are derived from the same root (They're not but I lack a better example off the top of my head). Saying black would not be the same as saying niggardly.

geargrinder 15y ago

Since Google changed their algorithms to deal better with web spam and useless articles, even blackhatters and web spammers know that you have to serve useful content to get search engine traffic. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-sea... Also, how much of this traffic increase has to do with the election, since Salon is a site that runs a lot of political stories? It is good they are seeing more traffic with fewer, better articles, but 2 months of record traffic in an election year would be expected of a political site. What will be their explanation in a year after the election is over and their traffic falls? He specifically mentioned there were no outlier events that drove traffic, but is that really true? The Republican debates and early primaries have been dominating most news outlets for a few months now. It certainly drives the stories on Salon today. Understanding what drives traffic, whether it be events, advertising, trends, etc., is essential to craft a content strategy that works in the long run. I do believe longer, engaging, original stories are good for the user, whether they are scanning or reading the entire article. They are good for SEO too. It will be interesting to see what happens with Salon's traffic and their new-found commitment to better content.

MichaelApproved 15y ago

"Short (a few hundred words) summaries or explainers about a major news event covered more in depth by somebody else. In its best form, we wrote short little decoders of a big story, and tried to link generously to the original source." I think there's a place for this, if done well. My startup lets the community summarize popular stories with an emphasis on being short, unsensationalized and to the point. This means we sacrifice Google traffic but I prefer to consume most news like this and I know there are others who feel the same. Of course, there are times you want a deep dive but that's when you go to Slate, NY Times and the like. If you're interested, it's http://skimthat.com http://skimthat.com Edit: This is kind of similar to Open Salon but with a very narrow focus on the type of writing: summarized news in a dry, direct way with no puns or jokes. The stories should be as short as possible while giving the reader a good understanding of the topic.