Flickr Image: mtsofan

by Stephen Lawrence*
Here’s a question I’ve been pursuing since this summer: “To what extent is the printed content of a newspaper duplicated on that paper’s website?”

The simple approach I’ve adopted is to compare the articles that our BurrellesLuce readers have accepted for our client’s search terms against whatever content I can locate on the corresponding website for that particular publication. In other words, I conduct a classic apples-to-apples comparison.  And, being that our clips are digitized it’s simple enough to gather up the necessary data in preparation for this task.

What’s not so easy is navigating the sites themselves… An original story is much more likely to be found on any paper’s website, while syndicated material (from news to lifestyle to sports) are much less so. And calendar/event listings from the print edition?  Good luck finding them online, particularly if the content is hidden in the archives.

A surprising number of papers – typically smaller dailies or weeklies – don’t have websites; if they do, they only link to local portals. Their original printed content is simply unavailable in the 2.0 version. Is that really a great loss?  The NNA, along with the Missouri School of Journalism, has recently reported, “Eighty percent of America’s newspapers have a circulation of 15,000 or less and that nearly 75 percent of those who read small papers actually read them in their entirety.” But, those local placements won’t be found by any spidering bots or trolling indexers. Only by those loyal local readers who tend to keep those papers around for a week.

Now, if you’ve kept with me this far, here’s a colorful anecdote that I’d like to share: 

While checking a Top 50 DMA newpaper’s site against our clips, I kept drawing blanks for a single article. None of the search words were returning anything from the site that resembled what appeared in the print edition.  This was an original story, A Father’s Day Gift Guide to be precise. Then I entered the article’s title into the search engine and, viola, a good link kicked me straight to the …. story? 

Not exactly.

The site had, for whatever reason, reproduced the title and the first two paragraphs of the article on the web, but the remainder of the article wasn’t there. Hence my missing search words. So, what had happened to the rest of this article?  It had been linked to the page as a JPEG image. In essence the entire printed page was scanned and slapped onto the web as a graphic.  There were no tags, no metadata, or anything to distinguish this lost little page.

Why does this all matter? Depending on how you target your stakeholders you must take into account how the online and print content is different. If you have a regional public relations campaign you can no longer assume what ran in the print edition also reached an online audience. How does the content of your local sites and papers compare? How would you report on the example provided where the partial article appeared with the JPEG link?

*Bio: A native of Mesa, Arizona, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a major in Near Eastern Studies. I began my career with BurrellesLuce in 1997 as a reader. As with most readers, I developed a special relationship with my assigned papers – those small town dailies and weeklies of the same flavor that my family had been employed in for two generations. Currently, I hold the position of quality assurance specialist, troubleshooting daily production issues. Outside interests include woodworking, and keeping my wife and dog happy. Twitter: BurrellesLuce; Facebook: BurrellesLuce

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 8:54 am and is filed under Media Monitoring, Public Relations, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.