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Track Twitter followers for UK newspapers

October 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton 7 Comments

Twitter followers for UK national newspapers have been tracked for a while now by Malcolm Coles over at the Online Journalism Blog.

And there are some really interesting insights emerging – besides the fact that at 1,665,202 followers in total, the entire UK news industry has serious competition from the likes of Ashton Kutcher (3,777,896 followers )and Stephen Fry (794,146 followers).

Take out the @guardiantech account, which contributes 1.2 million followers, and things really don’t look brilliant in terms of scale for most accounts – it might look better if you aggregated all Times accounts, for example, but you’d still be in the low tens of thousands, and you’d still be part of a 400,000 (approx) total.

And although there’s reasonable growth, it’s again all skewed towards the Guardian Tech account, which is benefitting heavily from being included in the Suggested User List for new users.

The question is why news sources – which are proving to be pretty popular judging by their homepage statistics – are so much less attractive on Twitter?

I don’t think it’s the wrong location for finding news and information – in fact the opposite is true.

I do think there are potentially two reasons:

1. Perhaps the strength of major media news sources – which has been written about by many people – is in aggregating and providing context and insight into what’s going on, rather than attempting to ‘beat the crowd’ to the first tweet?

But I suspect it’s more likely to be:

2. If you simply plug in an RSS feed and then bugger off, you’ll never get anywhere.

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Filed Under: twitter Tagged With: best practice, counts, followers, newspapers, rss, suggested user list, tracking, twitter, uk

Is any magazine company leading the way digitally?

July 21, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Does any magazine company have a clear strategy for their digital business? Viewing it from the outside, there seems even less chance of picking who will be successful in the future.

Dennis Publishing seemed to be leading the way with online mags Monkey, iGizmo and iMotor, but has gone on to buy The First Post and bit-tech.net. Now it’s buying Kontraband, which has been around for 10 years, and has seen unique users decline from 10 million to 3 million as online video has solidified around the likes of Youtube and the BBC iPlayer.

Integrating video from a Dennis-controlled site into the other properties might make sense – after all, the various outlets guarantee a certain number of views, and there won’t be a need to share revenue with Google/Youtube.

Future Publishing is adding an online album club costing £3 a month for Classic Rock to let people read online reviews and download advance copies of the accompanying albums.

Meanwhile Conde Nast is closing Men.Style.com to focus on a new GQ.com website, Businessweek is up for sale by McGraw-Hill, and my former home at Bauer Media has been pretty quiet on the digital front since relaunching Aloud.com and shuttering Ditto.net (which has now been removed entirely from the internet).

So what seems to be a wise move?

Dennis expanding their portfolio seems logical, especially as they can now experiment to see whether their own revenue from Kontraband makes more sense than the bigger marketing potential of Youtube, and whether they can entice their 3 million unique users with some text to accompany their videos.

Conde Nast aligning their online and offline titles is also a good move – too often companies have tried to build portal sites which incorporate a number of magazines – to hide costs and a lack of content and resource – and have ended up trying to establish new brands whilst confusing audiences. And there are some really viable alternatives…

What don’t make sense?

I’m not entirely convinced by an online album club – granted the Classic Rock audience are more likely to be familiar with an album club than torrenting MP3s, but is there enough to justify £3 in the face of memberships for the increasingly familiar Spotify and Last.fm? Plus the music labels are making their own moves to become content providers, along with the artist themselves.

Having worked on Ditto, obviously I’m biased about it, but as it was pretty much quiet on the staff/development front, it seems strange to save some minimal server costs.

Oh, and I’m still not tempted by the print UK edition of Wired. Besides the obvious ‘geeks on the internet’ issue, I’d have rather seen a larger U.S. edition which included more UK coverage and content to boost awareness of UK companies, and to go further to justifying the cover price.

Any less confused?

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Filed Under: Digital Publishing Tagged With: digital, Digital Publishing, epublishing, magazines, online, publishing, uk, websites

Some reactions to Digital Britain…

June 17, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I haven’t been able to fully digest the Digital Britain report to be able to dissect it and add anything to the commentary already online, so I thought I’d share the thoughts of those people who I value enough to have in my RSS feed every day:

Digital Britain Scorecard: So how did Lord Carter do? – Paid Content.

What does #digitalbritain mean for journalism – Adam Westbrook.

Digital Britain calls for pirate-free universal broadband – Ars Technica.

Digital Britain: 2015 – First thoughts on radio – Adam Bowie.

(Disclosure – Adam Bowie is a colleague of mine at Absolute Radio, although the views expressed on either of our blogs are our own, and do not necessarily represent the views of our employer. )

I’d also recommend the always erudite and interesting Bill Thompson, – Digital Britain engaging with the internet – but his blog appears to be down at the moment. Luckily he’s also available on the BBC site.

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Filed Under: Digital Culture Tagged With: Business, culture, digital britain, Digital Culture, future, internet, uk

UK newspapers get it wrong again with UK's oldest Twitter user… – Updated May 18

May 18, 2009 By Dan Thornton 4 Comments

Update: Techcrunch has followed up the article and revealed that the staging was done as PR by The Geek Squad, and was simply picked up by the newspapers. So rather than creating it badly, they repeated it badly.

A recent story did the rounds of UK papers and news bulletins as The Telegraph and The Sun claimed to have found the UK’s oldest Twitter user.

But as Techcrunch revealed, 104-year-old Ivy Bean happened to send her first ever tweet at the same time as the newspapers were writing their stories about her.

And her first ever tweet?

‘I’m enjoying Twitter for the first time and having my photo taken.’

Which would be one of the two messages she sent which were visible on the photos accompanying the articles.

What’s shocking isn’t that someone thought it was a good idea to ride the Twitter bandwagon with the type of story that fills empty time at the end of a news bulletin.

What’s shocking is that they were inept enough not to bother faking it a bit better – maybe starting the account a day before at least? And not taking a photo of two tweets – the first of which mentions them? Don’t they know tweets are publicly accessible, indexed by Google and archived?

Then again, they’re still running stories about the banality of Twitter written by journalists who normally use the service for a couple of days at most for research, without following or interacting with anyone.

Because obviously searching for the writers, journalists and bloggers who actually understand how the service works is far too much effort.

And when those same articles question the truth behind tweets and retweets around news and events, you might want to point to the fact The Sun managed to get Ivy’s age wrong in it’s headline – her username, IvyBean140 might have been a clue!

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