As promised, here’s the rest of the skinny on The Miami Herald class tour, which wasn’t so much a tour but more a walk around the newsroom that ended in a construction area that soon will become a television set.
Yes, it’s a week late, which would be strictly forbidden in the 21-hour world that is the Herald’s continuous news desk. At least I absorbed the concept of optimal timing for blog posts—8 a.m.—to capture as much of the “cubicle audience ” as possible.
According to Rick Hirsch, managing editor of multimedia and news projects, Web traffic peaks on Mondays between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.
This is when workers slog into the office, plop down in front of their computers, still trying to knock the weekend cobwebs from their heads. And, what better way to do that than by surfing the Web, Hirsch said.
When the cubicle crew goes home about 5 p.m., site traffic drops about 25 percent.
But don’t think the site sits stagnant. It is updated constantly, hence the 21-hour news cycle. Although, the staffing level does thin out and the updates slow down after 5ish.
Still, updates are audience specific. Viewers, for example, will find more sports on the homepage in the afternoon. And, it’s high school sports mania from Wednesday to Friday, the days leading up to the games.
This attention to the habits of its audience, Hirsch said, helped the number of visitors to newspaper’s Web site jump by more than a million visitors—from 2.8 to 3.9 million between Aug. 2007 and Aug. 2008.
Not too shabby.
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Ah, the Web. It's cool. The wave of the future. But it's not everything, despite what this young designer had to say in what I can only interpret as a disparaging reference to veteran print journalists at the SND convention in Las Vegas. Here's the link from Poynter:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=150467
Mike Higdon is the public editor at the University of Nevada student paper, The Sagebrush.
Mike Higdon: If newsrooms still exist in 25 years, and they're still institutional newsrooms ... You'll have two different news staffs –- if you still have print -- let's pretend that there's still newspapers, but they're very small and they're tabloids and they cover things in short-form style.
So, you have two newsrooms, one that covers Web exclusively ... and they cover the same stories and they cover them differently and the cover them exclusively for the Web. And then you'll have people WHO ARE 50 YEARS OLD (my caps) in the newsroom, producing a small, tabloid newspaper.
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