Amir Kurtovic

Freelance Journalist, Writer and Social Media Victim

5 Simple Tweaks That Will Increase Your Blog Readership

The easiest way to increase the readership of your blog is to … you guessed it …. blog more. But writing takes times, as does reporting. So, if you want to increase the readership of your blog without writing more posts every day, following these tips will help.

1. Headlines make the world go ’round

Your headlines have to sell the story, not tell the story. It’s as simple as that. After reading the headline I should be interested in reading more. This involves a change of thinking for most journalists. Headlines in newspapers often summarize the main part of the story. Add another deck below the headline and most people won’t bother reading the rest of the story.

But this is a different distribution model. If you have a reader with a newspaper in hand you want to make it easy for them to get through the whole paper. It’s called reader consideration. You’re supposed to make it easy for them to pick out the most important stories, read the ones that seems interesting and scan the headlines of the rest of them. But online, your headline is competing with a million other links that are begging to be clicked. Give the reader a reason to click the link.

2. Write Less

Brevity is king. Get to the point quickly. Readers will appreciate it. The intro paragraph to this post is three sentences, a mere 48 words. The headline promised you 5 ways to increase blog readership, not a display of my remarkable prose. Getting people to your blog or website is hard enough. Try  not to piss them off once they are there.

3. Don’t Use Links For Background Info

I see this mistake on most blogs and I am guilty of it myself. Somehow bloggers have been convinced that, instead of giving the reader a complete story including the background information, they can just casually mention it and provide a link. The theory is that those who know will keep reading, and those who don’t will click the link, read the other story and then come back to finish what you wrote.

Imagine reading a story in Newsweek that tells you to go find last month’s issue of National Geographic if you want to understand the rest of their story. Yes, on the internet it’s a lot more convenient and quicker to link to sources. But do the reader, and yourself,  a favor and summarize it anyways. You can still provide a link, but maybe they won’t feel the need to click on it. Because trust me, they’re not coming back. (p.s.: if you’re putting in links for background info leading to other sites, make sure the HTML code specifies to open them in a new window.)

4. Publish At Different Times

A good way to increase your traffic is to publish when people are actually reading (it seems so simple, doesn’t it?). If you are writing a news blog you need to publish your articles in the morning. You are targeting people who are checking the web briefly before they go to work and then several times during their work day. Publish between 6 a.m. and noon. I am writing this close to midnight, but will schedule it to run at 11:00 a.m the next morning.

5. Be Better At What You Do

Let’s face it, there are tons of blogs that look and read like no effort was put into them. If you are serious about increasing your readership you have to produce quality content. That doesn’t mean you need to break national news, but it does mean that you should take the time to read over what you wrote, check spelling and grammar, use the best possible artwork and all the other things that can make a difference. Make a commitment to read every post out loud before you publish it. Or print it out and read it over. If you don’t take the time to read your own stuff, why would you expect others to?

Syndication as a revenue source for online news outlets

Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, recently posted this entry on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.

He argues that syndication is increasingly becoming a profitable strategy for online news outlets. In his words:

Some have said that in the digital world, news companies need to think of themselves both as creators and aggregators, doing what they do best and linking to the rest. Let’s amend that: creators, aggregators, and syndicators, doing what they do best, licensing with zest and linking to the rest.

Here’s the link: The Newsonomics of new news syndication

Photos Of The Protest During Obama’s St. Louis Visit

Below is a gallery of some the photos I took during the protest yesterday in St. Louis downtown. To read my article about the visit on the Riverfront Times website, click here.

Stealing The News – When Bloggers Become Plagiarists

Journalism is under fire from all directions. Newspapers are losing circulation and shuting down. Reporters are getting laid off. Profits are bad, and the Internet has turned the news into a commodity.

Add to the list of growing problems: plagiarism.

Most journalists used to think that bloggers were nothing but plagiarist; taking their reporting and rewriting a few sentences, then throwing up a link to the article. But then concepts such as the “link economy” and articles going viral through social media made a lot of news organizations rethink their approach to bloggers. Instead of scoffing at them, they hired bloggers for their own websites (or made reporters do it as part of their job) and welcomed the boosts in traffic that comes from lots of bloggers sharing links of their articles.

But the truth is, it’s hard to earn a living blogging the news. If you spend 3-4 hours on one blog post, with reporting, writing and editing, you aren’t going to get rich any time soon. So some enterprising bloggers are saying “to hell with it all” and just copy and pasting sentences and quotes from newspaper website

Here’s an example from yesterday. I covered President Obama’s trip to St. Louis and the protests downtown for the Riverfront Times (The Screaming Match Outside Obama’s Fundraiser Dinner). I spent about 3 hours walking around, taking photos, interviewing people and getting hassled by the cops to get of the street. But, reporting is fun for me, so I’m not complaining. But then I sit down to write the article and decide to see if anybody reported estimates of many people showed up. The first result in my Google search for Obama’s St. Louis visit is an article on Examiner.com, a website that allows local “bloggers” to publish news articles and earn money from advertising revenue. Here’s an excerpt from the article, “written” by Andrea Simoncic, the St. Louis Conservative Examiner.

64 year old Frank Scimo of Ballwin helped organize a group of about 100 people to stand outside St. Charles high school to support the president and his speech on health care reform.

“I believe the people should have health insurance,” Scimo said. He pointed to his step daughter, who has been denied insurance due to a pre-existing problem with her knees, as a representative of those who lack insurance but need it.

Organizer of the nonprofit Jobs for Justice, Amy Smoucha, 42, said she left the president’s speech full of confidence in the president and his plan for health care. “I’m happy to see he is so sincere about fixing the health care system,” she said.

And here is an excerpt from an article written by Jake Wagman, from the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Frank Scimo, 64, of Ballwin, said he helped organize a group of about 100 people to show up outside the high school in support of the president and health care reform.

“I believe the people should have health insurance,” he said. He pointed to his step daughter, who he said was denied insurance because of a pre-existing problem with her knees.

Amy Smoucha, organizer with the nonprofit Jobs with Justice, said she left the speech feeling confident in the president and his plan.

“I’m happy to see he is so sincere about fixing the health care system,” Smoucha, 42, said.

Notice the differences? There aren’t many. On top of that, the few words that she bothered to change or add actually make the writing worse.

But this is not about writing. This is about plagiarism. Nowhere in her article on Examiner.com does the “writer” mention where this information comes from. Just from reading it, one would assume that she was there, that she talked to all these people and got all the quotes herself. In other words, one would assume that she did some actual reporting.

But reporting, too, is quickly becoming a commodity. Sure, news loses value quickly, and a scoop is not long lived. But I believe the day when journalists allow people to blatantly rip off their reporting and writing is the day they might as well retire. You can’t tell me that I’m going to work my ass off for half a day to write an article which is going to be copy-and-pasted two minutes after it’s published and thrown on a plagiarism haven like Examiner.com so that some lazy asshole can generate some ad revenue.

As far as the example I cited, don’t think that it’s an isolated incident or only a couple of paragraphs. All you have to do is copy whole sentences and paragraphs and do a Google search to see where the information is being lifted from. If you’re going to be a plagiarist and too lazy to rewrite the article, at least have the decency to say where you got the information from. Or alternatively, just roll over and die.

There’s a fine line between being a blogger and being a parasite.

Paywalls hit a wall – Only 35 sign up to pay for Newsday

How many people are willing to pay for online news? If Newsday is any indication, not that many. The New York Observer is reporting that 3 months after putting their content behind a paywall, only 35 people have signed up to pay $5 a week for access to the website.

Epic fail!

That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn’t know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35.

Michael Amon, a social services reporter, asked for clarification.

“I heard you say 35 people,” he said, from Newsday‘s auditorium in Melville. “Is that number correct?”

Mr. Jimenez nodded.

Source: The New York Observer

And if that is not enough bad news to give most journalist a headache, the paper had to dole out $4 million to redesign the website and set up the paywalls in the first place. By my calculations, as long as the 35 members live another 476 years and don’t cancel their subscription, Newsday will recoup that investment