Non-UK visitors dominate UK papers’ websites

Medialife writes that foreign readers make up a large percentage of the visitors to UK newspapers’ websites. Non-UK visitors make up 66 percent of the Guardian’s online audience and 78 percent of the Daily Mail’s.

“Among the U.S. papers, NYTimes.com gets 8 percent of its monthly unique audience from overseas, or about 1.3 million visitors, according to Nielsen//NetRatings numbers for July, while WashingtonPost.com and USAToday.com get about 3 percent from overseas.”

Some of the reasons behind this picture, the article says, may be:
– that British papers offer a far more global perspective
– that British papers operate in a crowded home market, which forces them to offer compelling content

And just like oscarh comments on Vassa Eggen, another reason could be that the US simply is a significantly larger market than the UK and therefore naturally has more local readers.

Top 10 UK Newspaper Sites by Global Unique Audience
Ranked by % that is overseas audience

1 Financial Times 80%
2 Evening Standard 79%
3 Daily Mail 78%
4 Independent 68%
5 The Observer 67%
6 Guardian 66%
7 Telegraph 63%
8 Times 59%
9 Scotsman 55%
10 Sun 44%

And if anyone is interested, Media Culpa is up there with the Times in terms of foreign readership. 58 percent of the readers of this blog are from outside of Sweden.

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Corporate blog not the place for GM strike

One “downside” of having a corporate blog is that your customers/clients/readers etc may have gotten used to having a dialogue with your company and their expectations on your communications probably have increased. In a situation like the ongoing national strike against GM, many people would probably hope to find comments from the auto maker on one of its corporate blogs. Now, there are of course situations when it is difficult to be as open as you would wish and this appears to be one of them.

Christopher Barger, Director, GM Global Communications Technology, therefore made a short comment on the GM FastLane Blog:

“We’ve seen a number of comments coming in regarding this situation, and we appreciate the interest and opinions that you, our readers, have about this matter. But as I am sure that you can appreciate, these are sensitive times involving sensitive negotiations; a public blog is not the appropriate place for us to be commenting about them, nor do we think it’s constructive to entertain a discussion of labor issues here.

This afternoon, we issued a statement regarding the UAW’s decision; to this point, that is our only statement on the topic. Any future comments we have will be issued via press statement, and not here on FastLane. Thanks for understanding.”

Although one could always hope for more openness, at least this is a good way of managing expectations.

Via Shel Holtz.

Update: What GM does, however, is link to other blogs. For example, Trollhattan Saab is an independent blog that comments on the strike here.

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Fired via email? At least it’s not SMS

You may have read about the US consumer electronics retailer RadioShack that laid off 400 employees via email a year ago. “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated,” the ominous message supposedly read.

And it seems that this practice is not uncommon in the US as a way to avoid face-to-face conflicts. According to a survey by the Marlin Company, 10 per cent of employees say their company has used email to fire or lay off employees.

In the UK however, they do it via text message. Chelsea owner Roman Abramovitj apparently fired coach José Mourinho via SMS. What’s next, getting fired via Facebook? Maybe you should think twice before accepting that social network invitation from your boss…

Via Shel Holtz.

“What did people do at work in 2002?”

Jan Gradvall reflects (not online) over the five years that have passed since the launch of DI Weekend. Many phenomena that today dominate our daily lives did not even exist five years ago.

“MySpace opened in August 2003, Facebook in February 2004, YouTube in February 2005. What did people actually do at work in 2002?”

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NT up for award, but its RSS feed is a disaster

The Swedish media publication Medievärlden has nominated Norrköpings Tidningar (NT), Helsingborgs Dagblad and Aftonbladet.se to the award as Editorial Staff of the Year. NT, which is Sweden’s oldest newspaper, founded in 1758 and one of the world’s ten oldest newspapers, has been nominated for its multi-channel focus. A news editor, a tv editor and a web editor together decide what will be published on the paper’s different news channels.

– TV brings emotions, in the paper we give facts and on the web we have the speed, says Charli Nilsson at NT.

NT’s ambition to work across multiple platforms is worthy of praise, but the paper’s RSS feed is far from a success, to put it mildly. Once you click on a link, you get an error message telling you that the page has been moved (even if it is brand new) and that you need to click on a second link to find it. But that link doesn’t work either. All you get is a message that the article could not be found.

NT

It’s a miracle that NT has even 5 subscribers to its feed on Bloglines. If the paper plans to continue to publish an RSS feed it needs to make it work properly.

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