Bloggasm

The online magazine Slate currently receives about 7 million visitors a month, but according to its editor David Plotz, only about 500,000 of those readers really matter.

“Until now we’ve been selling to the mass audience. Now once you have this abiltity to target you can really target your core audience… This creates strong incentive to create durable journalism,” Plotz said. “That one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader. The person who makes a commitment to your brand, if you’re a quality brand….. if you can get those readers, a smaller set of readers, who come to you three or five or 10 times a week, you don’t have to go after that huge other set of readers.”

This is the philosophy I’ve always held with my own writing; focusing on niches rather than raw numbers. Very few within the PR and journalism industries are embracing the strategy of micro targeting, instead targeting only the Technorati Top 100 blogs. And while yes, it’s nice to be linked on those sites, I’ve found that in most cases they’re adept at sucking up traffic and don’t do much in sending hits your way.

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This is the most amazing Nick Denton memo I’ve seen yet. So amazing I’m reprinting here in full:

From: Nick Denton
Date: Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 6:33 PM
Subject: We’re not running a newspaper

A few cases recently where we’ve thought *way* too much before publishing. Even when we’ve had exclusive information or even documentary evidence.

There’s always a good argument for waiting. Let’s check to see whether the associated claim is true; oh, the source might be exposed.

But we should publish anyway, making clear what we know to be true and what remains up in the air. Or even just publish a headline or quicklink and fill the story in later. We can always update. We can always write a second post when we’ve established more of the facts.

We’ve brought in some of the better traditions of newspapers. We’re breaking more stories than we ever have. That’s awesome.

But there’s no way we’re going to slow our publishing schedule to that of a ponderous newspaper-style organization — where everything has to go through layers of edit and approval and checking and legal. If we did that, we’d be neither as authoritative as a newspaper nor as nimble as the smaller blogs that *do* indeed publish as soon as they get something.

At some media organizations you might get rapped for running a premature story. At Gawker Media, you’ll lose way more points for being scooped on a story you had in your hands.

Nick

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Nieman Lab reports that Gawker has created a tip line that can be viewed by all. In a sense, this is a mashup of traditional and social news, with the crowd submitting the content while a array of Gawker editors are able to wade in and pluck the juiciest tidbits to promote to the front page.

This is very similar to the model of Fark, which has a Digg-like submission process but employs actual editors to go in and “greenlight” headlines to the front page. Fark’s ingenuity lies in the fact that they’ve convinced thousands of their most devoted users to purchase “Total Fark” accounts, which allow them to view the raw stream of submitted headlines, regardless of whether they’re greenlit.

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So far, over 9,000 blogs have signed up:

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George Ouzounian, better known by his internet handle Maddox, penned a post offering one of his readers a chance to give him swine flu. Titled “I hope I get swine flu,” the post argues that “it only takes a few minutes to look up the symptoms, mortality rate, and treatment to realize that [swine flu] no different from the common flu (which kills way more people and by extension is way more awesome).”

To prove this, he’s offering one of his flu-infected readers a chance to sneeze on him. The conditions?

Contest Rules:

# One lucky person will get the opportunity to fly me out to where you live* for one night**, and you get to sneeze in my face.
# Winner must provide a proof of having swine flu (signed doctor blood test or something along those lines).
# Winner must not have any other bullshit diseases. I don’t want your herpes, even though I can’t get them.

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Fans of the New Yorker still won’t ever forgive her for that Roseanne Barr guest-edited issue.

Daily Beast Turns One

Beyond our wildest hopes when we started last October. We closed September at 3.9 million monthly unique readers and 35 million page views, which is up 70 percent and 220 percent, respectively, since our first month. It took me eight years to build Vanity Fair to less than half that number. And the readers are loyal: 60 percent of them come back again within 24 hours. Of course, keeping ‘em satisfied is a 24/7 task. I know what the tireless blogger Andrew Sullivan means when he told me last summer that he sometimes feels like Fay Wray dancing in front of King Kong.

And the foray into the offline world:

It’s been nothing but new developments round here. Last week we announced our foray into book publishing, a new imprint called Beast Books that we are launching with Perseus Books Group. It gives our writers the chance to develop ideas that have already exploded on the site for a fast, short book that will be published first electronically and then as an elegant paperback. I’ve always wanted to do it. Books are the new magazines.

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