Jennifer Paull, David Teeghman and Lindsey Wolf
J-School Buzz
May 9, 2011
J-School Buzz is an independent news site that covers the Missouri School of
Journalism. We like to follow Henry Ford’s mentality, especially his quote that says, “If I
had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” If we had asked
Missouri journalism students what kind of website they wanted, they would have said
more or less a public relations site for the journalism school. Instead, we gave them JSchool Buzz. It may not be what they would have asked for, but we believe, it’s what
they needed.
Web Analytics:
For our capstone research, we looked at the web analytics for J-School Buzz using
several different online tools. First, since our site is based in Wordpress, we used to the
site stats that come standard with that service. This allowed us to monitor which posts
were the most common, where referrals to our site were coming from and what keywords
our users Google searched to end up on our site. WordPress Stats keeps track of J-School
Buzz editors and admins so it doesn't factor our visits or page views into its stats. But WP
Stats only counts page views, and provides no information about unique visitors or visits.
That's why we also used Google Analytics. Not only does it keep track of visits, but also
monitors each post and is a more reputable search engine keyword monitor than WP
Stats. And finally, Quantcast, which allowed us to look deep into the demographics of
those visiting our site. It also gave us the chance to share our traffic information publicly,
an option that is not available with WP Stats and Google Analytics. This is part of our
ongoing effort to be as transparent as possible.
But we didn’t stop there. We also looked at our traffic from social media. We
tracked retweets on Twitter, “likes” on Facebook and reblogs on Tumblr. Comments, on
both the J-School Buzz website and our Facebook page, also helped us gauge the
response our site was getting. We also used the URL shortening service bit.ly. With this,
we were able to track how many people clicked on these shortened links.
Based off the Quantcast Audience Profile, we learned everything about our key
demographic: gender, age, race, income and education. There is a pretty even gender
breakdown, with 52 percent of our visitors being female. The majority of our viewers fall
into the 18-35 age category. Since our site is based on college, it makes sense that college
students are our most common viewers. Second is the 35-49 age group, which we can
attribute to our professors. Coming in third is 13-17-year-olds, or prospective students. A
large majority of visitors are Caucasian, which mirrors the journalism school – and
Mizzou as a whole, which is almost all white. Nearly half of our users have an income of
over $100,000. Obviously, students are using their parents’ income, not their own. How
many college students do you know earning six figures? Half had a college education and
¼ had a Master’s degree. Quantcast’s profile also allowed us to compare our
demographics to those of the entire Internet, so we could see how we stack up against
other sites.
So why is it important to know your key demographic? So you can play to them.
By knowing who was coming to our site most often, we could publish posts that
interested them and, in turn, bring more of that demographic to our site. College students
were our highest visitors, so we published content centered around Mizzou and the
journalism school. This in turn brought our readers back, and they shared with other
college aged students.
Most Popular and Least Popular Posts:
J-School Buzz had over 100,000 page views over the past five months. The
homepage was the most visited page, but people clicked past the jump on these most
popular posts. 1. Is This the Coolest Student Journalist Resume Ever? 2. Half of Recent
Missouri School of Journalism Grads Can’t Find Jobs 3. Mizzou Students Celebrate
Osama bin Laden’s Death. All of these got several thousand page views.
So, what made certain content more successful than other? We looked at common
elements among our most common stories.
Multimedia: Posts that had multimedia elements were more popular because the
information is conveyed so easily. You can understand what is going on without having
the read an extensive text story. These stories are also shared on social media sites.
Oftentimes, when someone sees something visually stimulating, they share it with their
friends who, in turn, share it with their friends. An example of a popular multimedia post
is Half of Recent Missouri School of Journalism Grads Can’t Find Jobs, with over 5,500
page views.
Strong Opinion and Voice: Our readers reacted to posts that showed a specific stance on
a subject. We wanted J-School Buzz to be a place to showcase our thoughts and opinions,
and our readers responded to that. One of our contributors Colby Gergen wrote an open
letter to the J-School Buzz editors and visitors citing what was good and was a bad about
our site. Not only did this post talk about the flaws of J-School Buzz, but also the
Missouri School of Journalism as a whole. People were draw to this post, garnering it
over 1,000 page views.
Controversial Issues: Controversy leads to discussion. When we posted the RJI
assault story, the halls of the J-School were abuzz with everyone talking about what was
going on - should David have posted about an incident in which he was involved? It was
an ethical dilemma that got people’s attention. After receiving a lot of attention, David
decided to write a post about his thought process when deciding to post his side of the
story. As we guessed, this sparked a lot of controversy. The comments section turned into
a forum for everyone to share their opinions, and J-Schoolers are not shy when it comes
to giving their opinions. That being said, the controversy led to a lot of page views – over
2,000.
Crowd sourcing: People like to see their name in lights. They like even more to
see their photos and videos in lights. We used this to our advantage. Since we’re a small
staff of only three editors, there was a lot of content we were unable to cover. Instead of
just accepting this, we decided to use our followers, asking them to email and Tweet us
with their photos and videos that we could compile and post. Our most successful
example of this is Mizzou Students Celebrate Osama bin Laden’s Death. This started out
simple, a cell phone photo of students watching President Obama’s speech on the TVs in
the Future’s Lab. Then we got wind of the celebration erupting in Greek Town and it
turned into something so different. Instead of sending a reporter out there to snap photos,
load them onto their computer and then post them, we just found photos and videos our
Twitter family was posting. This attracted over 3,000 views, our third most popular post.
Process over Product: We firmly believe in process journalism. Instead of waiting
to have every single detail, we want to publish what we know at that moment as fast as
we can, then update it once we receive more information. This helps attract viewers
because they’ll see the original post, then continue to come back to the site because it
keeps changing. One day, Jenn got wind of a rumor that Brad Pitt would be on campus
later that afternoon. She had seen numerous tweets on both her own Twitter feed as well
as JSB’s. She sent out a simple Tweet and the J-School Twitterverse blew up in response.
Was it true? Where was he going to be? When would he be there? Everyone was glued to
their screens wanted to know the up-to-the-minute information about a celebrity possibly
visiting our campus. Then the post changed to show huge gatherings of students outside
the student center waiting to see Pitt in real life. After that calmed down, people took to
Photoshop to make photos showing Brad Pitt all over Mizzou’s campus: riding the Tiger,
in Brady fountain, etc.
By updating over time, it allows our story to evolve as the information is
changing. This story got over 1,500 views. Our most popular story combined a lot of
these elements to make a mega hit. It is Chris Spurlock’s viral resume. It was multimedia
because he made his entire resume into a graphic, it was controversial because he didn’t
come up with the original resume, instead he “borrowed” from someone else and it was
crowd sourcing because he got his “name in lights” moment.
On the other hand, some of our least popular posts didn’t even break 100 page
views. This included Starving Journalist posts and live blogs on event in RJI. We started
off the semester posting Starving Journalists as individual posts. We learned that once
people saw a starving journalist, they didn’t click past the jump for more information,
mostly because everything they needed to know, like the time and place, were on the
homepage. Instead of getting frustrated and ending Starving Journalists posts altogether
when we saw these numbers, we decided they were better off as Tweets. Our readers
were still interested in where the free food was, but didn’t necessarily need an entire post
dedicated to the event. Live blogs were another type of post that didn’t attract many
views. It’s unclear why there weren’t very popular. It could be because the events that
were covered weren’t very interesting to our readers, that our readers don’t enjoy getting
their information through the live blog format or that the live blogs happened at a time
during the day when many people weren’t available to track the post.
Content Sharing Agreements:
There are several reasons why certain posts attracted more attention than others.
One way they generated traffic was through our content sharing agreements. Several of
our posts were cross-posted on different media outlets, so our site has found its way onto
computer screens across the U.S.
Through our agreement with Huffington Post College, we can post anything in
their content management system, and their editor will approve it for publishing. The
Huffington Post is our most lenient content sharing because they don’t have extremely
specific criteria for content.
PBS Media Shift, on the other hand, is a little different. They prefer stories that
would be interesting to people from all over the U.S. So far, the only stories we’ve had
published there were about the Facebook and Twitter pages of top journalism schools
across the U.S. The pieces went through a few rounds of editing to be published on this
outlet.
Jim Romenesko preferred posts that were critical of the journalism school and so
were controversial. For instance, that Mizzou journalism grads couldn’t find jobs or that
the J-School's Facebook page needed some work. We were originally in contact with
Romenesko when he saw a Maneater article about J-School Buzz’s stereotype series, and
since then have had at least three stories be published through his site.
Every blog post that we published was also cross-posted on several less popular
social media outlets using a service called OnlyWire. We created profiles not just on
Facebook and Twitter, but also on others like StumbleUpon, Delicious and Newsvine.
Each of these was not popular enough to personally upload and link to JSB content, but
since we were able to find a single service that could do that at once, we decided to do it.
While the number of page views that we might have garnered from each site was
negligible, more important was the number of inbound links that came from these much
more popular websites. That's a key figure Google tracks in trying to figure out its search
results, and so most certainly bumped our website up in the search results.
Balancing Sugar and Spinach:
J-School Buzz came across a problem that many have faced before us: how to
balance hard news and fluff news. Sugar stories (like Brad Pitt coming to Mizzou)
generate so many page views. If your judging how successful your website is by
numbers, you would want to publish anything that will get eyeballs looking at your site.
But these stories also lead to a tainted reputation. If all you do is publish soft news that
takes little to no reporting, you’ll eventually be seen as a joke. Then, there are the spinach
stories, like the one about Biotech University, that take weeks of reporting and return
minimal page views. We’ve learned that you have to maintain a good balance between
the two to remain credible but still get the traffic you hope for. And if you look at all the
major news outlets, they have a good balance between Royal Wedding coverage and the
Alabama tornado.
Social Media:
We learned that social media had to be tended to every minute of the day. To
make sure we were always in contact with our readers, Jenn set up her smart phone to
have all of J-School Buzz’s social media accounts. Any time a J-School Info email was
sent out, she would read the entire thing and schedule tweets to make sure everything was
covered. There were times when Tweet were scheduled weeks in advance.
Twitter: 1,177 followers
Facebook: 421 “likes”
Tumblr: 39 followers
Four Square: 149 friends
Twitter was by far our most successful social media tool. Our stories were
automatically Tweeted out once they were published and it was easy to track how often
they were being retweeted be our followers. It was also our most conversational medium.
We were easily able to interact with our readers through at replies and direct messages.
Facebook was second only to Twitter. We would get “likes” on our posts and
people would comment, but it wasn’t as easy to communicate with everyone. We
attribute this to the layout and design of the site. It isn’t as convenient. Toward the end of
the semester, we tried to carry equal conversations on both Twitter and Facebook. We
didn’t want to cater to only one social media network because some of our readers were
only on Facebook.
We had the slowest growth on Tumblr. None of us had previous experience with
Tumblr, so we didn’t use it to its full advantage. Links to the different J-School Buzz
posts were automatically posted on our Tumblr page, but that was about it.
FourSquare had a lot of potential, but again, we fell somewhat flat. FourSquare
was difficult because there isn’t a HootSuite-type application to manage multiple
accounts at one time. This meant a lot of logging in and out depending on what account
you wanted to be on. Our ultimate goal was to check-in around the journalism school and
leave helpful “tips,” but we found that was easier said than done.
Multimedia:
From the beginning we knew it would be important to have multimedia on our
site. Readers want to be shown information; they don’t want to have to read. Or if they do
have to read, they don’t want it to be very long. While coming up with ideas for graphics,
we had to consciously make sure there were a variety of different types of graphics
published. We didn’t want everything to be a bar graph or pie chart, instead, we wanted
every type of information graphic to be represented.
We also had to make sure the graphics mostly revolved around the journalism
school because that was our key audience. A lot of the data we found dealt with all of
Mizzou of all of the colleges in the Big XII. While we found this information interesting,
we wanted the majority of our posts to be centered on the journalism school. And finally,
we wanted the text published along with the graphic added another element to the graphic
and didn’t just regurgitate the data represented in the graphic.
Operations
On the operations end of things, we made a few practical changes. The first was
writing an editorial philosophy, which can be found on the “About Us” page. It explains
what kind of content we create, and tells readers that the stories are not reviewed by
professors prior to publication. We also clarify that we do not strive to be objective, but
instead always insert voice and opinion into our stories. We also included a Terms of
Use, to cover any possible legal issues that may crop up. We did this at the urging of an
attorney who had read through our site. So far we have not had any problems regarding
our terms of use policy.
Also regarding operations, we hired a copy editor to edit all of our posts before
they are published. We had received quite a bit of negative feedback (primarily from
Magazine students) about our AP Style faux pas and use of the dreaded oxford comma.
Since none of us knew much about either of these issues, we put out a request on Twitter
for applicants for the copy editor position. We heard from six different candidates,
interviewed them, and chose Laura Li, a senior Magazine major. She does a fantastic job,
and we have not heard a complaint since we made her a part of our team!
Engineer Insider:
David had casually mentioned on Twitter that he thought a JSB-style website
could work for Mizzou's business school. A couple days later he happened to be working
a slow night at STRIPES when an engineering student named Josh Lory approached him
about doing just such a site for the engineering school. They talked about a vision for the
site, how it would work, what it would report, and after ten minutes David agreed to help
with it. After a few meetings to discuss some of the unglamorous background details like
web hosting and WordPress plugins, Engineer Insider went online. The editors live blog
and publish content throughout the week from contributors and work to promote content
on various social media outlets. Engineers practicing online journalism has been an
incredibly awarding experience for us.
Sustainability:
We were very excited to announce that fall semester 2011, being an editor for JSchool Buzz will count as an independent study with Mike McKean as the faculty
advisor. We decided to take resumes applications and interview perspective editors to fill
our positions.
We publicized this opportunity to make sure anyone who would be slightly
interested in becoming an editor would know about the opportunity. We posted a video
on J-School Buzz, sent out links via social media sites, attached the information to JSchool Info emails and the convergence list-serv emails and had an ad slide on the RJI
TVs.
On the application, we asked applicants to tell us what they liked about J-School
Buzz so far and what they would change. We got a variety of responses. Some were
enlightening, others not so much. We chose 10 prospective editors to grant interviews to,
and from there we chose four:
Clauda Tran: Editor-in-Chief
Mel Gibson: Social Media Editor
Francis LaBelle: Graphics Editor
Zach McGowan: Video Editor
We decided to split the multimedia editor into two positions because having
multimedia components is extremely important to J-School Buzz. Since it takes a long
time to create these multimedia elements, we weren’t able publish them as often as we
would have liked, so we’re hoping doubling our forces will help with that. We wanted
one editor that would focus on videos (something we did not excel in) and graphics.
Three sequences are represented with the editors we chose, so J-School Buzz will
no longer be centered around the Convergence department. This past semester, some
critics pointed out that we played to the convergence sequence more than others. We’re
hoping this will help expand our horizons.
Conclusion:
The three of us truly enjoyed serving as JSB’s first editors, and are excited to see
how the site continues to grow and develop after we graduate. We look forward to
serving as alumni editors, and will always be around to help out our new staff if they
need it. This semester has been an enormous learning experience, and we are extremely
appreciative of the criticism, compliments, patience and support that the faculty and
students of the Missouri School of Journalism have shown us.