Bloggasm

Amid the countless stories detailing the blows the newspaper industry has taken in both advertising and circulation, one positive theme has remained constant: More people are reading newspapers than ever. Or, more specifically, more people are visiting newspaper websites. The New York Times, for instance, has a weekday circulation of just over a million. Its website — depending on which metrics you use — has somewhere close to 18 million separate people that visit it each month.

But according to a new study (pdf) released by the Readership Institute, a division of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University, even this one glimmer of hope for the industry may be overblown.

To complete the study, the Readership Institute hired a polling firm to conduct over 3,000 phone interviews in 100 “impact” markets. The questions focused in on how much time and effort was spent reading a person’s local daily paper, making sure to differentiate between the print and online edition.

Based on the answers, the study concluded that website “penetration” is relatively low, with only a fifth of the respondents saying they visited their local papers’ websites within the past month. Approximately 62 percent of the respondents said they have never once accessed the newspaper’s website.

Mary Nesbitt, managing director at the Readership Institute, told me in a phone interview today that the level of website penetration has remained relatively the same since 2003.

“The penetration within the average impact area is not as high as most would like it to be,” Nesbitt said. “It has changed a little bit over the last few years, picking up a little bit. But there’s still a big opportunity to grow and engage an online audience.”

As for the print edition of the newspaper, its core readership is showing a slow, steady decline. The Readership Institute developed a “Reader Behavior Score” to not only measure how often a person reads his local newspaper, but how much time is spent with it and the extent to which he reads it. The RBS is based on a seven-point scale, and this year the average score was 3.38, a drop from 3.55 in 2006.

Respondents that were ages 18 to 24 showed the sharpest decrease in readership, with a score of 2.40 (compared to 2.84 in 2006). Older readerships either stayed the same or actually showed significant increases.

So what accounts for the disparities between the website statistics boasted by most newspapers and the results of this study? Nesbitt wouldn’t speculate much on this, but it’s possible that many of those new readers are flowing in from outside the local impact area, either through search engines or links from other websites. Also, the study relied on the respondents to make off-the-cuff estimations of the time they spent reading newspapers, a fact that likely resulted in people making generalizations for reading habits that are often very complicated and sporadic. Readership has always been an incredibly complicated thing to measure, and even with the sophisticated analytic tools we have today to measure website traffic, there are still unresolved arguments over how to accurately gauge a website’s readership.

But Nesbitt said one thing is likely certain: since the Readership Institute began conducting these surveys in 2000, readership is bleeding at a much slower pace than advertising and circulation revenue.

“What it tells us — contrary to what we read and see and hear — is that newspapers are not going to hell in a handcart,” she said. “At least in terms of their audiences … They are read and used by a huge number of people on a regular basis. Truth be told that number has been declining slowly and what has been driving that is that frequency of reading has decreased.”

And when I asked her whether there’s any optimism for the industry that can be found from these studies, Nesbett was quick with one positive piece of spin.

“Something that’s interesting is that even though website readership is very low, to me that says opportunity,” she replied. “And the other thing is how the trust and credibility of the newspaper seems to be having a beneficial brand effect on the website as well. That’s very positive to me.”

But whether this brand will remain intact remains to be seen. The Newspaper Association of America reported recently that online newspaper advertising jumped 19 percent in 2007.

The flip side to that? Overall, total advertising revenue has dropped 12 percent from last year. Only time will tell whether newspapers online counterparts will ever catch up, or if this decade truly signifies the beginning of the end of the industry as we know it.

Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Phrases like “via Boing Boing” and “via Instapundit” are ubiquitous in the blogosphere. At some point as blogs were emerging out of the primordial ooze of the internet it became ethical to not only link to content but to also indicate where you found the link. This kind of double sourcing is widely referred to as a “hat tip,” invoking the image of — yes, you guessed it — someone tipping his hat in acknowledgment.

But this is far from universal. Just while monitoring the blogs that link to bloggasm I’ve noticed that many bloggers never indicate where they found the link to an article that I wrote.

So what percentage of bloggers follows this rule? To answer this question I used Blogpulse to find three online sites that have been widely linked within the last few days. To provide variety, I chose one news article, one Youtube video, and one blog post.

I then plugged these links into Google Blog Search to find out which blogs were linking to these items. I went through each of the blogs and tallied up which ones used hat tips and which gave no indication where they came across the link.

Before I publish my results, let me issue the caveat that it’s entirely possible that many of these bloggers that didn’t provide hat tips came across the links on their own. For instance, one of the three items I used was a New York Times article, which the blogger could have easily found by visiting the NY Times page or subscribing to one of its rss feeds.

Still, I think this gives one a very rough idea of what percentage of bloggers follows the ethic of the hat tip.

I used these three links for my study:

1. Closing on Broadway: Two Traffic Lanes [newspaper]

2. Western Spaghetti by PES [Youtube video]

3. Confirmed: PaidContent Bought By the Guardian - Here’s How Media History is Made [blog]

In total, there were 78 blogs that linked to these three items. Of those, 20 — or 26% — gave hat tips. The remaining 58 — or 74% — didn’t indicate where they found the link.

Broken down by individual items, the news article received a total of 29 links, with 4 — 14% — giving hat tips and 25 — 86% — not giving hat tips. The Youtube clip received 32 links, with 11 — 34% — giving hat tips and 21 — 66% — not giving them. The blog post received 17 links, with 5 — 29% — giving hat tips and 12 — 71% — not.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about the practice; I don’t feel that a blogger necessarily deserves a pat on the back just for finding a link, especially when nine times out of 10 he probably just yoinked the link from someone else. This is especially true when the person who found the link is merely pointing to it rather than really adding depth to the discussion.

Like most my case studies, this could have used a much larger sample. But, like always, I was constrained by time. For now, Bloggasm is still an evening endeavor.

I’d be interested in hearing others’ thoughts on the matter, either by email or in the comments section.

Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Perfect timing. A day after I published my article on the effects of free ebooks, Neil Gaiman posts some numbers that he received from his publisher after it tried a similar experiment.

From Gaiman’s blog:

The Browse Inside Full Access promotion of American Gods drove 85 thousand visitors to our site to view 3.8 Million pages of the book (an average of 46 pages per person). On average, visitors spent over 15 minutes reading the book.

The Indies [ie. independent booksellers -- Neil] are the only sales channel where we have confidence that incremental sales were driven by this promotion. In the Bookscan data reported for Independents we see a marked increase in weekly sales across all of Neil’s books, not just American Gods during the time of the contest and promotion. Following the promotion, sales returned to pre-promotion levels.

Through an online survey, we know that 44% of fans enjoyed this browsing experience and 56% did not. Some of Neil’s fans expressed frustration with the Browse Inside tool for reading through a whole book. (This poor result is partially due to two problems which were fixed soon after the initial launch – mistaken redirect to the Flash-based reader and slow image load time)

Several people have noted that all the people who are touting their successes with free ebooks happen to have very popular blogs. I noted as much on an article about creative commons licenses I wrote last year. This is somewhat of a given, a kind of elephant-in-the-room situation. Yes, a free promotion isn’t worth anything unless you have an effective distribution system. That’s been true since before the internet existed.

But so far in all my research in the subject I’ve never come across someone who went the free ebook route and regretted it. And I think it’s an especially effective tool for promoting sequels by releasing the first book for free. That way the product you’re actually trying to sell (the sequel) isn’t in any sort of danger whatsoever.

A few months ago Tobias Buckell noticed a trend in his book sales that most midlist novelists don’t typically see. His book Crystal Rain, which had been released in mass market paperback a year before, experienced a sudden spike in sales, more than doubling from the previous week. Perhaps even more noticeable was the jump in sales of the sequel to that novel, Ragamuffin, which saw an even more dramatic increase.

This was unusual because most titles by midlist authors are sold within the first few months of the release date; after that they drift quickly into obscurity as newer books are given shelf space in book stores, often times pushing the older novels out of the store completely.

When Buckell opened a Bookscan account to track his sales he had to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring him from giving any specific numbers, but in a phone interview he asserted that the sales bump was significant enough not to have been a fluke.

But what caused this sudden increase? Because of all the myriad factors that drive product buys it’s incredibly hard to pinpoint specific triggers, but it just so happened that the jump occurred right after Crystal Rain’s publisher, Tor Books, had released a free ebook version of the novel online.

Tor began putting out free ebook titles earlier this year to pump up subscriptions to its email newsletter. It will use that newsletter to promote a new science fiction “super site” it’s reportedly launching on July 20 to coincide with the date Americans landed on the moon. Rather than posting the books at a specific URL where people can go to download them, only those who have joined the newsletter list are given access to the titles.

Buckell told me he was asked to participate in the ebook giveaway by Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who approached him about it at an SF convention.

“Patrick and I were at Boskone and Patrick was buying me a drink and asking if I’d be interested in having the book in one of the giveaways to get my name out in front of lots and lots of people,” he said. “I had the paperback of Ragamuffin about to come out soon, and I figured it was a good idea to get my name out there — it couldn’t hurt. I love the idea of giving the first book in a series away. It was an easy ‘yes’ for me. So I checked with my agent to make sure he had no objection. Theoretically Tor owns the electronic rights to it, so they can do whatever they want. But Patrick did check with me and pretty much everyone else was on board with the idea.”

The theory that free ebooks released online will boost print sales is not a new one. Information radicals like Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross have been releasing their books under Creative Commons licenses — which allow readers to freely pass around the texts without fear of copyright infringement — for years, but it’s only recently that most major publishers have dipped their toes into the pool (though incidentally many of Doctorow’s books have been published by Tor).

Authors who go this route believe that the ebooks act as a form of advertising, arguing that the negative effects on sales from people reading it for free are offset by the word-of-mouth campaigns those same people will initiate. These Creative Commons evangelists also tend to point out that most readers don’t like long texts on a screen, a fact that may cause them to buy the print copy once they’ve sampled enough of the story online.

“I don’t know what the perfect storm of promotion is in terms of trying to reach people,” Buckell said. “I definitely think that the biggest threat facing authors is obscurity. I work in the niche field of science fiction, which is being overshadowed by fantasy right now. I love it, it’s my field of choice, but having done a survey a few years back where I compared the average [book] advances for science fiction and fantasy, I knew the fact that I chose to work in science fiction meant that I’d have probably halved my average advance and readership. Things like this mean getting the word out that I exist can be a major hurdle. Anything that gives me eyeballs is a good thing right now.”

But SF novelist John Scalzi was cautious when talking about his own experience releasing his book Old Man’s War as a free Tor download, noting that it’s incredibly difficult to scientifically correlate any marketing methods to actual sales.

“‘Scientifically’?” he wrote to me in an email. “Probably not, unless you somehow managed to control (or at least account for and factor in) every incident of someone discussing your work and or going down a decision path to acquire the work, which is probably more work than it’s worth. But I don’t think that ’scientifically’ is the standard required here; I think ‘heuristically’ is probably better. If you consistently see a rise in sales of an author’s work after the release of a free e-book, then heuristically you have a good idea it’s beneficial.”

In his case, Scalzi watched sales of his book shoot up by 20 percent. But what’s even more interesting is that the sequel to Old Man’s War saw an increase of over 30 percent. Both he and Buckell benefited more from sales of books later in their series.

Not all Tor authors I spoke to saw such impressive numbers, however. Like the others, Daniel Abraham was approached by an editor to see if he’d be willing to give away his fantasy novel A Shadow In Summer. The novel is the first in a four-book series — the second was released last year — and its ebook format hit the web in April.

In a phone conversation yesterday Abraham said that he didn’t see any significant increases in Bookscan sales for either A Shadow In Summer or its sequel. Instead, the numbers stayed relatively the same. But he stressed the fact that he didn’t see a drop off in buys either and argued that regardless of sales figures the release still benefited his career.

“It would be in my interest to have more people read my stuff, whether they pay for it or not,” he said. “If I had the choice of having five people buy a hardback and getting the money for that, or 20 people buying a paperback and getting the same amount of royalties, I’d go with the paperback. If I had the choice of getting no money but have four times as many people read the book and talk about it to their friends, then I’m fine with that. The chance to build a relationship with the reader is more important than having an immediate sale.”

Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden didn’t respond to my interview request for this article, but back in February he told me that there were no plans to continue releasing the ebooks after the publisher’s new site launch.

“The free digital books are exactly what we say they are: an inducement to get people to pre-register as users and allow us to send them emailed progress reports,” he said. “The book-length freebies are a temporary program slated to run from now until when we launch. Although the site will be ‘giving away’ a lot of content–indeed, all of its content, as we don’t anticipate any part of it being DRMed or paywalled–the core of the site will not be built around a program of free novel giveaways. That said, we reserve the right to give away free digital books any time we think it’s a good idea to do so. (With the cooperation and consent of their authors, naturally.)”

Every Tor author I spoke to for this article said they hoped the publisher would continue offering the ebooks even after the new site debut. When I asked them whether they would be willing to offer another book of theirs to the giveaway list there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation with their answers.

“I totally would,” Buckell said. “I really think the biggest threat right now is obscurity. Even in my own town — I live in a town of 5,000 people — there are still people who will come up to me and ask if my second book came out, or if I was still writing … I ran into one of my readers at a convention not too long ago at a room party. They asked me when the second book is coming out, and I said ‘oh, it’s been out for quite awhile.’ And later that night they bought a copy. Even people who want to buy my books can miss that three-month window where it’s on the shelf and not even realize it has come out. So there’s such a battle against obscurity and anything that lets me throw myself at the wall to see what sticks is a positive thing right now.”

Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Today I received the second email in a month from a blogger who said that my message had gone into his spam folder. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he had made a point of checking it now and again, it would never have reached him.

I send out a pretty large volume of email for bloggasm. I’m constantly corresponding with other bloggers and interview subjects — whether I’m doing research for an article or networking.

I’m always incredibly paranoid that some sentence or link or phrase in my email is going to trigger the automated spam police and whisk my message away, never to be seen again. When my paranoia is at its worst I think about switching email accounts or opening multiple accounts with other companies and sending test emails to see if they get through filters.

A number of emailed interview requests are never returned. I often wonder if the person isn’t responding because he didn’t see the email, or is he just not interested in being interviewed?

This is a negative effect I don’t think many people consider when they talk about the pain that spam causes. There are probably thousands — if not millions — of legitimate emails that never get through every day.

In the middle of May, Variety, the trade magazine for the entertainment industry, published an article stating that Juno director Jason Reitman would be directing a new movie based on Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air.

In the world of film fans this was huge news; with Juno’s almost-universal critical acclaim many were waiting anxiously to find out the next project Reitman would take on. Missing from that article, however, was any reference to the journalist’s source. Also nonexistent was a mention of the movie website, Latino Review, which actually broke the story earlier that day.

Whether Variety stole the story from the Latino Review without sourcing is hard to say. The trade magazine didn’t respond to my email and El Mayimbe, the Latino Review journalist who broke the story, declined to be interviewed (”already got a bunch of other appearances to do” was his bizarre response).

But on May 20, the Latino Review’s editor, Kellvin Chavez, published a piece dramatically titled “Why both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter TOTALLY SUCK!” In it, he not only claimed that Variety stole the story, but both it and The Hollywood Reporter fail to give credit for scoops all the time.

“As a precaution, when we broke the story we even emailed Borys Kit over at The Hollywood Reporter and a reporter at Variety,” the editor wrote. This, he said, was evidence that the two publications had directly lifted the facts from the Latino Review article without any attribution.

This was evidently the straw that broke the camel’s back. The weekend before that CAPSLOCK-filled article hit the net, several editors of popular film websites exchanged emails about this trend and some came to the conclusion that retribution was called for.

“May 20th is a special day in the Latino community because May 20th is when Cuba declared it’s [sic] independence from Spain back in 1902,” Chavez wrote. “Today, we here at Latinoreview coin May 20th, 2008 as the day we declare our independence from linking to trades.”

In other words, the website would refrain from ever sending any direct traffic to either Variety or The Hollywood Reporter ever again.

David Poland owns Movie City News, a popular film site with about 10 writers — he said he’s often referred to as the “Drudge of the movie business” — and his publication has been around for about five-and-a-half years. Poland was one of those who were involved in this email exchange, and in a phone interview he said that the trade publications often rationalize their lack of sourcing based on the notion that small movie sites publish “rumors,” which the larger publications then verify.

“The trades are used to being called first, because essentially 90 percent of the news they publish is placed by publicists,” he said. “It’s not really an investigative business. When you see something in Variety, it’s because the release of the news was timed. That’s changed enormously because of the internet — people who don’t have the relationships that Variety and the mainstream media have do what they want whenever they want to. So all of a sudden those playing in a traditional playing field are feeling a certain degree of anger and certain degree of dismissiveness; they’re claiming that these websites are not vetted in the same way [the trades are] vetted.”

While talking to Poland I couldn’t help but detect a certain degree of sympathy in his rhetoric. When I asked him about it, he said he recognized that the trades were acting the way they were out of some unspoken struggle for relevancy within an internet age.

“Traditional media has a lot of infrastructure,” he explained. “The rules are different and the pressure is on every side. Because of this people are behaving badly on a regular basis. Variety’s editor is not a fan of the internet — he continually has been talking about how terrible the internet is. But at the same time, they’re trying to take advantage of this universe. I’m enormously sympathetic because people are worried about losing their jobs.”

But Vic Holtreman, the creator of the movie opinion site Screen Rant, told me that the trade magazines cater to an entirely different audience than the movie websites, a fact that has left him perplexed as to why Variety even feels threatened.

“I don’t know that I would categorize it as a conflict — it’s competition,” Holtreman said in a phone interview. “What happened was that the small websites started out early on as sites that found movie news and delivered to the average person. From my point of view, Variety is a trade magazine. I always felt that before the internet Variety was mainly read by industry people. It seems now that it’s trying to expand into an area that these other sites owned first. If [Variety] doesn’t succeed on the web in reaching the average person not in the industry, then it could just contract back into serving the movie industry itself, being read by movie executives, actors and writers.”

Though the Screen Rant writer was involved in the email discussion with the other sites on how to address the problem, he said that he has mostly remained on the sidelines. Because his publication focuses mainly on opinion rather than breaking original news, he doesn’t feel that scoop theft has really affected him directly.

Holtreman explained that the essence of the link — which makes it easier than ever to point to your source — has created a kind of informal code of ethics within the blogosphere when it comes to giving credit to the writers that deserve it.

“When you get down to it, fair journalism is fair journalism,” he said. “And if someone breaks a story and then you go on and report it, if you did not go and dig up the facts yourself you ought to reference the site where you first heard about it. There are times when I double source stuff … if I see something on one movie site that originated on Variety, I won’t just credit Variety, I’ll credit the site I found the link on. I go out of my way to give credit where it’s due.”

Other movie site owners I spoke to for this article agreed with this sentiment. Clint Morris, the creator of Moviehole, seemed especially bitter when recalling instances where he had been ripped off.

“Where do I start?” he wrote to me in an email. “With the major newspaper that took several of our stories and published them word-for-word (with my typical smart-assý comments left in!) a year or so back; one being our scoop about Geoffrey Rush returning for a third ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie? Oh, and the outlet didn’t deny it either when we approached them about it – they just made up an excuse (apparently they had let an intern write up all the stories that week/month/year and he/she wasn’t informed before-hand that he/she couldn’t just cut and paste articles from the web). It was an absolute disgrace though! They didn’t even change the titles of the stories!”

But William Beutler, who once wrote for the Hotline’s Blogometer and now works for the online marketing firm New Media Strategies, said this trend of mainstream media outlets stealing scoops from the blogosphere is not confined to film publications.

At his personal site, Blog P.I., he has documented a number of instances where big media outlets — ranging from the Daily Show to Radar Magazine — have claimed “exclusives” when they were anything but.

“I do think that the electronic medium and ethic of the link make it all the less defensible,” Beutler said in a conversation recently. “And as I’ve argued before, hat tips are good for readers. This isn’t necessarily about giving credit to whomever got there first — on the web, it’s sometimes very difficult to know who was exactly first with a particular coinage or idea — but it’s helpful to the reader, so they can dig a bit further, if they so choose.”

He argued that it would actually benefit the MSM to adopt the “hat tip” rule that has been adopted by the blogosphere, mainly because it would make their reporting more reliable. By withholding sources, Beutler said, “they’re keeping themselves above the fray.”

“There’s really no excuse for it, and I suppose they think it makes them sound more informed than the reader,” he said. “I think it makes them less credible, since I can’t check it out for myself and determine if I agree with their interpretation of the source material.”

But how can a publication fight back if others continue ripping it off without sourcing? Beutler and others I interviewed were at a loss when I asked them this question. By refusing to link to the trade magazines at all, the Latino Review developed its own method of retaliation. But how effective could this be in a blogosphere made up of millions of websites? Unless a significant number of them decided to boycott a news source, then the effects would likely be minimal.

“I don’t think there is any solution except to keep on going,” Beutler said. “And if the problem persists, eventually one writer or newspaper or magazine will be made a poster child for not cribbing scoops. And perhaps some of this is generational, so over the long term, reporters and editors who have always coexisted with what Glenn Reynolds would call the ‘army of Davids’ will take them more seriously.”

Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Since I published my article about the Anti-Obama blog outages last night the story has exploded across the blogosphere. I probably should have expected this, but I was surprised to find that within hours Blogspot users were announcing boycotts. All kinds of conspiracy theories were launched. Bloggers were using the incident to attack Obama, Google, or both. Free speech was under attack. Nazi comparisons were made. And I think an LOLcat or two weighed in.

C’mon people, get a grip. If you read the article in full you’ll see I expressed a good deal of skepticism as to whether foul play from Obama supporters was the cause of all this.

I tried to contact Google for my article; no response. But I spoke to New York Times writer Miguel Helft today and he did manage to get a response from the search giant, which he published in this article:

On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

Also, at least one of the affected bloggers got this email today from Google:

Hi there,

On behalf of the Blogger Team, I want to apologize for the recent trouble you’ve had with your locked blog. Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science, and although we are constantly working to improve our tools, it appears that our filters have caused some Blogger accounts to mistakenly be blocked from creating new posts.

While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the “Just Say No Deal” network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. Regardless, we have restored posting rights to your blog, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.

So once again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience as we looked into the problem.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

Their explanation is certainly interesting, and if true it means that Obama supporters had absolutely nothing to do with the Blogspot lockdowns.

I bet a few anti-Obama folks who thought they had discovered Hitler 2.0. might be feeling a little silly right now. Of course Miguel told me that Google wasn’t really elaborating much on this issue, and their claims sound a little suspicious, but wouldn’t it be ironic if they were telling the truth and the blogs were flagged simply because of the mass emailing?