Surely, I thought, the Post story -- by well-regarded media beat reporter Howard Kurtz -- was wrong on that point, and the Gannett paper would request a correction. But now, more than 24 hours after the story first hit the Post's website late Sunday, those figures remain unchanged.
Here's my yardstick: The Tennessean's weekday circulation averages 134,000 copies, according to the latest ABC data -- a reader base big enough to suggest its web traffic would be much higher than 20K a month. (For a comparison, Gannett Blog's traffic averages well north of 100,000 page views monthly.)
I don't have access to the latest traffic stats for all Gannett papers. Maybe one of my readers does. If so, please consider dropping a dime my way.
Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write jimhopkins[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the rail, upper right.
Not a surprise to me. If you look at Census data, you see U.S. computer ownership and use is lowest in the south. If you don't have the machine and a connection, you can't use the Web. Plus the Tennessean seldom publishes much of interest, unlike the days of John Seigethaler. You have to stir the pot to get some reaction, like readers looking at your Web site.
ReplyDeleteNo, that figure's bullshit. I don't work at Nashville & so don't know their exact numbers off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure that should be "an average 20 MILLION page views per month."
ReplyDeleteAnyone familiar with a Site Catalyst report?
ReplyDeletewow i hope poster at 1:20 doesn't work for Gannett.
ReplyDeleteTennesseean dot come gets around 20 million+ page views a month, at least earlier this year. So that WAPO story could be a type.
Jim,
ReplyDeleteLansing gets somewhere around 5 to 8 million hits a month. Ergo, it's almost inconceivable that the Tennesseean only gets 20,000 views a month.
Jim should go door-to-door in the South to find out who has a computer and what sites they visit.
ReplyDeleteIf he survives longer than 3-4 days doing that, I will be surprised.
Proof that it is a right number is there is no correction on Kurtz's column. I'm sure the newspaper execs read it and if they disagreed they would have protested.
ReplyDelete4:21, that is just a bad argument. It has to be right because they haven't corrected it? Riiiiiiiiiiight.
ReplyDeleteDid you get fired before or after Jim?
Commenter at 1:20? Bite me. Then go learn how to spell Seigenthaler.
ReplyDeleteOur city flooded. Our people died. We damn near ran out of clean drinking water. Our basements smell like rancid anchovies.
The water rose so fast, the only warning some people had was when they looked out the window and saw their cars getting washed out of the driveway. Then the water started bubbling up through the floor vents.
The flood twisted railroad ties like pretzels. It washed cars into trees. It swept away a teenage kid and buried him so deep in the creek mud that the only way his parents found his body -- 11 days later -- was by smell.
I'm told we get 20 million hits in a normal month.
This was not a normal month.
This was a really, really crappy month, for everything except web traffic.
But nobody can say there isn't anything interesting to read in The Tennessean these days.
Thank you, 6:28 pm. You guys have had far more important things to do than correcting another newspaper's mistakes.
ReplyDeleteThe average monthly traffic is about 20 million. The total in the first two weeks did more than double. Howard Kurtz was made aware of the error and responded that it would be corrected, although obviously it's not been changed.
ReplyDeleteThe Post's ombudsman Andy Alexander has made his two-year tenure a crusade to get the Post to fess up to its errors. His column today says the Post has got its backlog of un-run corrections is now down to four. Nashville should complain to him.
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ReplyDelete"The water rose so fast, the only warning some people had was when they looked out the window and saw their cars getting washed out of the driveway."
ReplyDeleteYou of course mean besides the flood warnings that were on TV and Radio for 3-4 hours before the flood right? And not counting the news channels and even the Tennessean saying there was a strong change for very strong storms and flooding the day before right? And not counting when all the media outlets reported tornadoes in Memphis and heavy flooding in West Tennessee before the storm got to Nashville right?
I've never before seen so many tech-savvy Gannett journalists confuse page views, hits and unique visitors.
ReplyDeleteyes, and 10:54, that Nashville residents chose to live in areas that were in the 100 year flood plane and so knew the risks of flooding. BTW, these are houses that earned premium prices for being on the water before the flood.
ReplyDeleteCorrect number is 20 million, based on April 2010 data.
ReplyDelete"I've never before seen so many tech-savvy Gannett journalists confuse page views, hits and unique visitors."
ReplyDeleteThe people here are about as tech-savvy as Elmer Fudd. We even have a thread where people are waiting for the day when print pushes Internet to its death.
As a former employee of The Tennessean (I left on my own, I was not a layoff statistic). I would imagine that there is not enough people left there to watch over things like that. They have cut their people so close to the bone that it's all they can do to just get a paper out, or get a story up on the website. The Tennessean does a decent job considering what little staff they have now. My friends still there are stuck because they are either too old, or there is just not any other jobs for them to go to, The management there knows this and is taking full advantage of it. My heart goes out to them.
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