It’s Time to End ‘Trending’: The first problem with “trending” is that it selects and highlights content with no eye toward accuracy, or quality. Automated trending systems are not equipped to make judgments; they can determine if things are…
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A collection of 31 posts
Facebook acquires content sharing tracking tool CrowdTangle
Alex Heath for Business Insider: Facebook has acquired CrowdTangle, a four-year-old tool used by publishers like Vox, BuzzFeed, and Mic to track how their content is shared on social media. Click through to CrowdTangle’s customer list and look at…
Analytics for Journalists: some further reading
I’ve just finished* running a workshop on analytics for journalists at news:rewired this afternoon. Here’s a selection of links I promised the attendees to allow them to explore some of the issues contained in the presentation in…
Journalism: a craft with some useful metrics
Martin Belam on the reasons for his latest post: And having just sat through an event where one of the questions was a worry that knowing something about SEO or writing for social risks “losing the craft” of journalism, I…
The big challenge: good, unsharable content
The content we talk about least right now is content that gets a lot of reads, but no social media shares, Likes or retweets. Too many systems are set up to monitor these external marks of quality – from Facebook’s…
Dark traffic rising? No need to panic
This is not news. The fact that people think it is is news: The Guardian’s website is being swamped by unidentifiable “dark traffic”, and executives at the company cannot figure out where it is coming from. “Dark traffic” reflects…
Gawker plumbs the Facebook traffic valley
Another reminder of the dangers of building your business on one company’s platform: Those are Gawker’s figures – and why did that valley happen? Read and his co-workers think that this is the result of some algorithm changes Facebook…
Why do we obsess over home pages no-one uses?
Talking of homepage traffic, Zachary Seward has actually looked into the NYT homepage traffic for Quartz: Traffic to the New York Times homepage fell by half in the last two years, according to the newspaper’s internal review of its…