FRIDAY'S LETTERS: Australian Web Editor Explains How It's Done Down Under

By: E&P Staff The reader below, the managing editor of two of Australia's biggest news Web sites, comments on Steve Outing's latest article: Sophisticated Web Stats Give Editors Better Idea of Reader Interests.

Nice piece; I wonder if you are aware of the news selection that goes on at aol.com? When I visited the aol news team near Washington two years ago, they showed how the small selection of news items foregrounded on their home page (this is the aol network, mind you) is entirely based on user response/traffic; as Garry Kebbel, who was then the director of news services, pointed out, if a story was flagging it would be dumped in favour of a more likely popular read. In a way it was like TV ratings in real time.

FYI, the two news sites I look after -- www.smh.com.au and www.theage.com.au -- are the sites of Australia's two most popular broadsheets, ie, upmarket, "quality" papers. Yet we have since the earliest days given good space on the home page to the kinds of stories more likely found in our print tabloid rivals -- celebrity gossip, "hey martha!" yarns, crowd pleasers. We are well aware that this will drive traffic ... but we do keep this material off to the right of the main news hole, so we cover the important news in the way that a solid broadsheet does, front and centre.

Interestingly, we sometimes get disdainful comments from our colleagues in the print edition: "how can you run that shit?" As if we were letting them down. We say that the Web site has a different, younger audience (only 20% crossover between the readers of Web and print for our brand) and that some of those stories feed their demographic interests -- but we still, as I said, cover the news as seriously as ever.

We have a little box showing our most read stories on the front page, at the bottom, which shows all of our readers in real time what they're all clicking on; we also regularly send a bulletin to the whole editorial staff on traffic and happenings on the Web site, with actual stats for the top stories of the previous fortnight. We think it reassures our serious colleagues that genuinely important stories -- especially ones with their own bylines, and not a wire story -- usually rate just as highly as the stories with sizzle, although the biggest
sizzlers are always at the top.

Regards

Mike van Niekerk
Managing Editor
The Sydney Morning Herald online
The Age online