It started with a tweet:
And soon it spiralled into quite a discussion on Twitter and even a blog post on Strange Attractor. I don't have a lot to add to what Kevin says there (but I do recommend that you go take a peek), other than to recount how I came to tweet that in the first place. I'd overheard a conversation between colleagues, wherein one was expressing surprise that nobody had responded to their first forum posting.
And I come across this a lot. Journalists are genuinely surprised when their new blog or newly-launched forum aren't instantly innundated with hordes of readers. In fact, I remember a Daily Telegraph political reporter expressing this very shock at an event Shane Richmond hosted a couple of years back.
And I come across this a lot. Journalists are genuinely surprised when their new blog or newly-launched forum aren't instantly innundated with hordes of readers. In fact, I remember a Daily Telegraph political reporter expressing this very shock at an event Shane Richmond hosted a couple of years back.
I think, perhaps, that much of this sense of entitlement is rooted in
the fact that magazine or newspaper packages conceal the popularity of
each item within - people have to buy the whole package, and it's hard
to determine what they read and what they don't. (Market research is
great for telling you what people think they should like, not what they
actually do...)
And so we merrily assume, on a subconscious level at least, that our audience is actually a big chunk of the thousands of readers who pick up our titles. (Although some, as Angus pointed out, might assume that people are reading everybody else's stuff. And as a journalist who has occasionally lacked self-confidence, I can identify with that.) This assumption is challenged by the web, which is one reason some journalists get very, very twitchy indeed when you start talking about page impressions - a point Peter Houston made in this morning's discussion.
This, though, is an inevitable consequence of the atomisation of content that the web brings. We might still be building websites, but people interact with those sites one page at a time. That's the nature of the web - any page can link to any page, and people's reliance on search for navigation means that the home pages we build and the navigation structures we try to impose on our sites are, to say the least, optional.
Each piece of content on the web lives on its own, freed from the constraints of the "package". And that can be frightening and liberating. And we need to figure out ways of building audiences one page at a time.
(This has turned into quite a long post, given that had "didn't have much to add", hasn't it?)
And so we merrily assume, on a subconscious level at least, that our audience is actually a big chunk of the thousands of readers who pick up our titles. (Although some, as Angus pointed out, might assume that people are reading everybody else's stuff. And as a journalist who has occasionally lacked self-confidence, I can identify with that.) This assumption is challenged by the web, which is one reason some journalists get very, very twitchy indeed when you start talking about page impressions - a point Peter Houston made in this morning's discussion.
This, though, is an inevitable consequence of the atomisation of content that the web brings. We might still be building websites, but people interact with those sites one page at a time. That's the nature of the web - any page can link to any page, and people's reliance on search for navigation means that the home pages we build and the navigation structures we try to impose on our sites are, to say the least, optional.
Each piece of content on the web lives on its own, freed from the constraints of the "package". And that can be frightening and liberating. And we need to figure out ways of building audiences one page at a time.
(This has turned into quite a long post, given that had "didn't have much to add", hasn't it?)
Been following the discussion today - really liked the way it turned into a much deeper dioscussion. Agree with your final analysis that it really is a page at a time process. I think it is liberating to be able to concentrate on the interesting bit and link to the rest.