Recently, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Ron Popeil. An American inventor, Popeil is responsible for such gadgets as the Chop-O-Matic, the Veg-O-Matic, Hair in a Can Spray and the Showtime Rotisserie Oven which he hocked on many late night infomercials. It was this last product that has been on my mind much of late.

Popeil claimed that it was so easy to cook whole chickens in the Showtime Rotisserie Oven that all you had to do was “set it and forget it.” This phrase popped into my head recently while I was trying to explain my approach to website management.

Too many online staffs treat their websites like the Showtime Rotisserie Oven. They, say it with me, “Set it and Forget it.” Enamored with automation, they design sites that is chock full of headline pulls, RSS feeds and automated dayparting, Flash galleries, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a technophobe, but the problem I have is that all the automation becomes an excuse to not deal with their site unless there is a problem or special project. They never stop to ask, are the right stories are being presented at the right time? Is the best photo being featured? Are our visitors being best served? They never ask because well, it’s all automated.

To me, that just spells missed opportunities.

I believe that the pages on your site should showcase not just the best, but the most appropriate and appealing content that your visitors would want at a given moment. And yes, that means change comes often.

My approach is to use metrics to help plot a roadmap and then use your journalistic sense, your common sense to make the right choices. Are there places for automation? Of course, but your site won’t grow automatically it requires your constant attention.

So if you want to cook a chicken follow Popeil’s advice. But if you want to grow your site, take my advice and do the work yourself.

How fast can you turn your ship?

When I look at many newspaper websites, I just can’t help but wonder why some stories are in a featured homepage slot and, even more so, why they remain there for so long.

I recognize that every market has it’s own issues and what is a popular story in say North Jersey, might not work in Ann Arbor, Michigan. So while I sometimes wonder if “Gardening to Extremes” deserves top billing, I will ultimately bow to the taste judgment of local editors. But what I will question is why that and many other stories keep that top billing throughout the day?

Looking at a variety of sites I see a couple of patterns at work: There are sites that keeps their top stories in place until there is breaking news. There are the sites that rotate content based on the time of day. There are the sites that don’t change anything and even breaking news is only treated as an update. And then there are those that appear to take an approach that I think all sites should emulate. The producers and editors at these news sites let their audience guide them.

It make little to no sense to me to keep a story in one of your prime spots if it’s not drawing an audience. Honestly, I don’t care if it was the top of 1A and you think it’s a hoot or the most important story “evah”, if it’s not bringing them in, then what are you achieving?

How do you deal with this at your newspaper? Do you pay attention to your analytics and let the numbers be your guide? I know that previous posts both here and elsewhere have caused readers to bristle over the use of analytics. But come on, can you argue that knowing what is or isn’t working or your site is really a bad thing? Newspapers spend a lot of money for analytics. Omniture, one of those more popular services starts at $20,000 and easily climbs from there. If all you are using it to find out what was popular before the morning meeting or on the previous day, then I would argue that you’re wasting good money.

So back to that nautical talk. I think you should be able to change the direction your site is going as frequently and as often as you find necessary, that you’re always offering your best content (whatever that may be). My suggestion is that you come to an agreement on a threshold for keeping or moving content based whichever metric you want use, and then, by golly, tack to the starboard or tack to the port, but turn your ship.

Increasingly, on newspaper websites, I see “Most Viewed,” “Most popular” and “Most Linked” lists. Having my own blog, I know that these types of features can help increase the amount of time that people spend on a site and interlinking helps spread page rank throughout the site.

But as a visitor to these sites, the lists leave me wondering. I want to know how they’re calculated, how frequently they’re updated and what span of time they supposedly cover. But I find that few, if any, sites that I was able to find, provide even a piece of that transparency.

For a lot of visitors, the technology behind a website could just as well be witchcraft. They don’t know the Java on their computer screen from the java in their cup. By the time they come to your site, many of them have already had mixed experiences with recommendation engines on sites like Amazon or Digg. I include myself in that category and I’m sure you could as well. I mean how many times have you visited Amazon only to be recommended a product that left you shaking your head and wondering what it had to do with you?

So what can you do?

First of all, if your site doesn’t already have a most popular list, get one going; it really can make a difference.

Secondly, make it clear what the list is — is it “Most Popular” of the day, week or month? For example, if you dig deeper into the New York Times’s list, you’ll find that they offer a 3, 7 or 30 day list as well as what I guess is a daily list. Now I’m not saying you have to go as far as multiple lists, but you can state the period it covers. Find a place on your site to explain how the list works and include how often it is updated.

Finally, cross promote it. There is no reason why you can’t include in print what the previous day’s most popular story was and where readers can normally find this information on your site. Doing all of this will help drive more traffic to your site, keep people on it longer, spread your page rank, oh and make me happy.

Primaries and caucuses can be a traffic boon for newspaper websites. The days leading up to Election Day, the day of and even the days immediately thereafter can bring thousands and thousands of new unique visitors and possibly tens of thousands additional page views (and many, many, many more for larger papers).

While most newsrooms are great when it comes to planning content to draw people to their sites, how many really focus on content that will keep them coming back? The question seems to be how do you transition an occasional visitor to your site to a regular visitor? Think about what keep just 2 or 3 percent of those new visitors would mean to your stats. So, what are you going to do to keep them?

Online staffs in New Hampshire, Iowa and Michigan, what did you do? What worked and what didn’t? What advice would you have for newspapers in states that haven’t gone on this fun ride yet?

6:08 p.m. (EST) Thank you Shawn (see comments) for pointing out that Michigan hasn’t happened yet. It is Wyoming that help their Republican primary on Jan. 5. So Wyoming newspapers, what tips do you have?

Does your site offer complete meals or just a tasting menu? The debate over partial versus full RSS feeds is far from new, but is just as relevant today. And as more newspapers, thankfully, offer RSS feeds, the issue is worth reexamining.

This is another topic where, I believe, the online practices of newspapers are in contrast to those of their readers. According to a 2007 Bivings Report entitled “American Newspapers and the Internet; Threat or Opportunity?”, 96 of the top 100 newspaper websites they visited use RSS technology. Of those, 93 offer partial feeds and only three offer full feeds.

Conventional wisdom has been, and I don’t see why this wouldn’t be the case for newspapers, that a full feed would reduce the number of clickthroughs and negatively impact page views and therefore revenue. In theory, that makes sense. Offer a partial feed and people who want to read more of a story will click the link and wind up on your site (and possibly go on to click even more). Offer a full feed and people will read the story and move on without ever visiting your site.

But evidently in this case, theory does not meet practice. Last April, Rick Klau, VP of Publishing Services at FeedBurner wrote:

“As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We’ve seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.”

So according to Feedburner, “the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds,” offering only a partial feed doesn’t bring more people to your website. And a look around the Internet found something else, partial feeds actually enrage readers.

In April 2007, Ed Kohler wrote an open letter to media sites on technologyevangelist.com:

“I am so tired of truncated RSS feeds. Why do you continue to work under the assumption that you’re better off forcing people to click through to read blog posts or news stories rather than allowing them to read content within their feed readers?”

And in August, Henry Blodget, Editor in Chief of the Silicon Alley Insider, wrote that when they started their site, full feeds were the “the single most popular ‘suggestion’ we got, too. In our case, it got so bad that frustrated readers started flaming us in discussion groups, vowing never to visit our site again.” I have no doubt that newspapers are hearing this as well, at least if they are giving people the opportunity to tell them.

What might makes matters worse for newspapers is the way they handle their feeds. I took a look at the RSS practices of the top 10 newspapers (based on FAS-FAX numbers ) and here’s what I found (links are to the pages of the RSS feed directories):

1. USA TODAY – Partial feed (first 106-206 characters)
2. WALL STREET JOURNAL – Partial feed (first 162-200 characters)
3. NEW YORK TIMES – Partial feed (first 170-217 characters)
4. LOS ANGELES TIMES – Partial feed (first 157 – 329 characters)
5. NEW YORK DAILY NEWS – Partial feed (first 98 – 180 characters)
6. NEW YORK POST – Partial feed (first 224 – 232 characters)
7. WASHINGTON POST – Partial feed (first 120 – 245 characters)
8. CHICAGO TRIBUNE – Partial feed (first 107 – 199 characters)
9. HOUSTON CHRONICLE – Partial feed (first 91 – 205 characters)
10. NEWSDAY – Partial feed (first 139 – 182 characters)

That they offer partial feeds isn’t surprising — the Bivings report has already covered that — but newspapers further aggravate subscribers to their partial feeds by at times not even offering complete entries. I saw sentences that were abruptly cut off or posts that were only headlines, is this really how you want to treat your online readers?

What makes matters worse, is that newspapers are actually hurting themselves by sticking with the partial feed strategy

“Active bloggers, the folks most likely to link to stories, overwhelmingly use RSS feeds–so by publishing full feeds you make it that much more likely that they’ll link to your stories,” Blodget wrote.

His point is echoed and expanded on by Mike Masnick on Techdirt:

“Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two.”

I honestly don’t believe that newspapers are thumbing their noses at what’s becoming conventional wisdom or even a web best practice. More likely the issue of partial feeds versus full feeds is on the “list” along with dozens of other issues — to be dealt with at another time. But, I think I can help. Take it off the list and make the switch to full feeds, your readers will thank you, heck I might even thank you. And in the long run, I think you might even be saying thank you as well.

So, those are my thoughts, where do you weigh-in on this issue?

Data is all the rage nowadays. From Gannett’s Asbury Park Press’s DataUniverse to Roanoke’s DataSphere it seems as if every newspaper wants to have an online portion of their website devoted to showing off their data prowess.

But there is a problem with many of these sites. In addition to being what Matt Waite so entertainingly calls “Data Ghettos”, no one has figured out how to monetize them. As a result, the sites are not really designed with the readers or end-user in mind, and little to no thought goes into their longevity. What does go into these sites is a disproportionate amount of resources — money, staff and equipment.

What makes this situation even sadder is that many of these data sites, regardless of extensive their information is, are not even used by the reporters and editors at their own newspapers. I have colleagues, for example, at Gannett newspapers who say that they don’t go to their DataUniverse sites and will rather make a phone call or look up the information elsewhere.

So lets review, money and manpower is being invested to create and maintain these sites; advertisers are not attracted to them and are not purchasing ads on them; they are not used by their own staffs; and they are not even drawing a lot of traffic. Compete.com claims DataUniverse.com drew only 3,050 uniques for the month of November. Even if you disregard Compete’s “rough estimate”, one has to question the continued viability of these sites.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love data. I believe that newsrooms typically have way more data then they realize and that harnessing and organizing that data is key to newspapers being able to truly compete in the world of the 24-hour news cycle. But is this the best we can do? Really?

I think that we need to stop treating these sites simply as editorial sites. They are not some holy cow that can’t be touched by the revenue side of the business.

I think we need to approach the creation of data sites much as if they were verticals (you know, like our real estate or automotive sites). Yes there needs to be a place for content and discussion of user interface, but there needs to be an equal discussion of the revenue opportunities and the sites marketability.

Given the state of revenue at many newspapers, I don’t think we can continue investing in online products that stroke egos, provide little continued service to readers and brings in little to no additional revenue.

If a person were to read much of the recent discussion about the ways journalists (AKA reporters and columnists) should be compensated, they might walk away believing that performance-based compensation is a foreign concept in today’s news organizations.

Yet as anyone who works in a newsroom and ventures into other parts of their building likely knows, performance-based compensation is actually alive and well. At many newspapers, this approach is used in departments from advertising sales to circulation and even marketing. And where base compensation is not tied to performance, bonuses typically are.

But this is not a simple issue and online reaction really has ranged. I think that some of the negative comments have been in response to the incorrect notion that people are suggesting that base compensation be tied to online performance. I believe this happened because the term salary was often used almost interchangeably with bonus. That aside, I personally found some of the posts convincing and agree with Lucas Grindley that:

“…a bonus system doesn’t hurt anyone. But it might help retain top talent while also increasing page views and audience.”

Given all the passion that has been expressed in blog posts and in comments, it’s clear that this is not an issue most news organizations are likely to reach a consensus on any time soon. I did find it interesting that many if not most of the people who have opined or blogged about this issue currently work in the online side of the news business. While I’m sure that many of these people were “once” reporters and most currently “work” with reporters, I’d be interested in hearing from some actual reporters (what this says about the online habits of reporters, is another issue all together).

With that all said, I would argue that is not a bad idea and more importantly, that there is a place for this type of compensation structure in our newsroom today.

I would suggest that a performance-based compensation plan be applied to current online employees like online producers, online editors and others. Especially given that many newspapers are fond of calling a 1.25% annual pay increase a “raise,” this type of compensation plan could help keep talented technical employees while improving their performance and helping the website grow. As I’ve previously blogged, newspapers need to start thinking like pure-play businesses.

So for example, an online editor would receive a base salary but also a bonus that is tied to increases in page views and unique visitors. If they were to post a story, and push it out to say Fark or Drudge and some local sites, and as a result X number of additional uniques were drawn to the site bringing Y number of additional page views they would receive a bonus. Same thing could be done on the creative side for say a staffer who produces a Flash package or video presentation; reward performance that succeeds online. And this analysis would be easy thanks to all the online data that newspapers collect.

I believe that this is a scenario that could help news organizations grow revenue and improve their site, while rewarding employees and increasing retention. To me that’s a win-win. So what’s left to debate?

Recent posts by Jack Lail and Patrick Beeson got me wondering about how newspapers use the online data they collect.

On Sunday, Jack wrote a post about the firing of career columnist Penelope Trunk allegedly because “her columns commanded low advertising rates.” He explained that:

“Print media writers look askance at how ratings affect TV news, but in the digital economy, they face the prospect of eventually being tied to their advertising generating power, the almighty CPM, or advertising cost per thousand impressions.”

That got Patrick writing a post that proposed the question:

“What if instead of salaries, newspaper reporters and columnists were paid according to the advertising CPM (cost per thousand) their work generated online?”

Fortunately for many reporters, Patrick concludes that now is not the right moment for this approach:

“Though it would be interesting to use it as a metric for bonuses or raises.”

He closes by encouraging reporters and columnists to inquire about their own CPM.

Now I don’t know if Patrick was being serious or not, but it’s a great idea, especially since most newspapers have access to vast amounts of data about their websites.

See news organizations need to have some way of justifying the rates they charge online advertisers. They require statistics like the number of unique visitors, number of pages views and the times that people visit their sites. In order to collect and analyze this data, many newspapers contract with companies like Omniture or SiteMeter or set-up their own server-side data collection systems.

Since the primary purpose of this data is advertising and marketing, reports (daily, weekly, monthly or whatever) are shared with executives in those departments. Senior editors may see data for the most viewed stories, if that. And maybe, reports are shared with editors and some reporters. But overall, that’s typically as far as it goes and therein, I believe, lies the problem.

This data should be shared, widely, throughout the newsroom. I think it’s important for desk editors and reporters to understand the habits of their online readers. Desk editors should know what stories play best online; this is not to say that you don’t report some stories, but editors should understand of what plays best and where.

Newsroom staffs should understand how content is playing on social news and bookmarking sites. Are photo galleries receiving lots of views and what about audio slide shows? How are our video’s doing? While I don’t think the data should be used to weigh and justify every coverage decision, it should be taken into consideration, just like an editor considers what else a reporter is working on before assigning them another story.

We all talk about how powerful data is — we use it to prove points, justify decisions and attract people to our sites. Well data about your website is powerful too, so what are you doing with it?