Following high school athletes on Twitter

Twitter lists are arguably the most underutilized tool. I follow zero athletes, pro or college, for the teams I've covered over the years. It's easier to put them in lists and it's specific to what I need. Moreover, they don't clog my timeline.

Twitter lists. I strongly recommend them.

 

See, I never understood this logic. If people aren't going to buy the paper, what difference does it make?? Unless you have some sort of a paywall, are you making any money on page views? The whole industry has screwed itself by giving away everything of value.

 

If you are selling advertising on your web page, then web views are important.

 

I hear ya.

As a company, no way in Hades would I buy that. I can't recall ever, ever buying anything as a result of a web ad. Newspapers bought into the idea that web ad revenue would offset the loss of print revenue and I'm not sure that's been the case.

 

I think you're right on the money. Most people are basically Twitter 098. The lists would at least take you up to Twitter 201.

Speaking on another underused tool, Google News Alerts. It obviously doesn't work on bigger beats, because you'd just get pinged to hell and back. However, where I used it at my previous stop was to set up news alerts once a player signed at a college outside our coverage area. Too often those kids would have gotten lost in the shuffle. Now, when the paper there quotes the left tackle from our own Podunk High, or another kid finally sees action at running back for the first time, your alerted and you have two sentences for the notes column or you can tweet it out ... and people think (and they've said to me) you're doing a really good job keeping up with the local kids.

Work smarter, not harder, my grandfather used to say.

 

Absolutely. How many people don't run some kind of ad blocking these days? When I was still in the business and working for people who were about as computer literate as a toad, it confused the hell out of them when someone walked by my screen with the paper's site up, and I had all their ads blocked. "Ohhhh, there is something wrong with the web site. We can't see the ads." "No, I just have them blocked… same as everybody else outside this building."

 

I agree about the industry screwing itself. We do have a paywall on our site, and sell single and weekly passes for people who may not want to subscribe. The theory being that the more people that at least get to the website, the higher the chance they'll subscribe, either to the web or the print edition. It's hard to get anyone to subscribe if they don't know there's a product out there to subscribe to.
Now that's the theory, I have no clue how effective it is in reality.
Same thing for web ad revenue. No clue how effective it is, but the ads you don't run sure aren't effective. And though most people have pop-up ad blockers, I doubt very many just have straight ad blockers.
the bottom line for Twitter is really a lot about exposure, for yourself and your work.

 

Yeah, I see what you're saying. But newspapers were around long before the internet. I'm not a 20-something, but do people actually not know they can subscribe to the hometown newspaper (print edition) if they want to?

Don't know what the stats are on paywalls and subscriptions, but I haven't bought one. A few newspapers (including a couple I formerly worked for) have a "limited access" thing where you can read up to a certain number of stories per month for free. Want more? You have to buy it. Thus far, I haven't been that compelled to purchase. To do so, the content would need to be must-read, not some wire story I can find on ESPN.com or wherever.

I miss reading some of my former colleagues' work online, but it's not so compelling I pay for it. That fact has taught me volumes about the value of our industry. When I don't read the paper --- or don't watch the TV news --- I normally don't feel like I missed much. Unless it's 9/11, of course.

 

The more I think about it, I don't think the industry screwed itself necessarily. The internet is a newspaper killer, and there simply is no good answer.

Ultimately, I think the only real hope is the free/advertising supported model. It's not a good one by any means, but the paywall model won't work in the vast majority of cases, so that's what you're left with. It's never going to be as lucrative as print, but print is dead, and no business model's going to fix that. The internet is a vastly superior medium on every level except generating income. That sucks for the business, but as my old boss loved to say, it is what it is.

Bottom line, you're going to have to drive web traffic for the model to work, and Twitter is a damn good way to do it. Be the person people need to turn to on Twitter for some specific type of information, and use that to push them to your website.

 

So newspapers lived not off subscriptions or rack sales, but advertising revenue. So the key is to find a vehicle that advertisers will buy and pay good money for.

I think the internet works great for news, and even conversations like this. I just don't think it's become a viable advertising model yet. When I figure that part out, I will make a few billion and let you know.