IT Dept Deathmatch: Obama’s Project Narwhal vs. Romney’s Orca

Digital Management /

Since the election, my former co-worker Sean Gallagher has been doing a great series on the presidential election’s digital campaigns for Ars Technica. After reviewing the campaigns’ financials, his overall conclusion is that by hiring great people and focusing on open-source and off-the-shelf tools, the Obama campaign created a competitive advantage while saving huge amounts […]

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Why Digital Media Can’t Rely on an Advertising-Only Business Model

Digital Journalism /

The New York Times’ Tanzina Vega reports on a type of automated ad buying called programmatic or real-time bidding (RTB), the latest advancement from the ad network community. The general idea is that an ad buyer bids on every page where a prospective buyer goes, in real-time. The intended result is to get an ad or series of ads to follow the customer across the web. The unintended result is that it lowers the revenue of every media property that participates.

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Media Enters the Age of (Statistical) Reason

Digital Journalism, Search Engine Optimization /

The media is finally figuring out figures. The coverage of Nate Silver’s tremendous success at statistical analysis has shown both that sophisticated data analysis can be newsworthy — and have tremendous real-world impact. According to the New Republic, on Nov 5th, Silver’s 538 blog garnered over 20 percent of NYTimes.com’s traffic. (deadlink: http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109714/nate-silver-the-times-biggest-brand) While publishing

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Delivering ‘Likeable’ Content NPR-Style

Audience Development, Digital Journalism, Digital Management /

In the past two years, many large media properties have begun focusing on delivering “sharable” content — articles aimed at increasing links in social media. This is somewhat in contrast to a common strategy of the previous years: creating “searchable” content, aimed at increasing an article’s presence in search. However, in spite of the emphasis,

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Google Trends Eats Google Insights, Also “Celine Dion or Torture?”

Audience Development, Digital Journalism, Search Engine Optimization /

Google Insights is no more. It has been absorbed by Google Trends. Both Trends and Insights have been useful tools for writers and editors looking to improve their articles’ SEO. Google Trends also lends itself nicely to a game I call “Celine Dion or Torture?” where you put in phrases until you find an unrelated,

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Search Engine Land’s “Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors”

Digital Journalism, Search Engine Optimization /

Danny Sullivan’s “Search Engine Land” is always a great source of info on the dark continent of search engine optimization. They’ve just released an infographic that covers both factors that are under the control of site owners and those more nebulous elements as “authority,” and “reputation.” It’s a clever cheat sheet, and for most, all

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