An interesting piece from The Atlantic magazine last month that I have been meaning to post about entitled Cut This Story!…Newspaper articles are too long.

It is one of the first semi-mainstream articles I have come across that deconstructs an article into a collection of assembled words. And in the authors opinion, all too often articles have way too many words that do not add any value to the story at hand.

The value of a word, a collection of words, an article and even a publication is in the eye of the beholder, so I am not going to rehash this authors take on things. You can read the article and see some interesting examples he uses of wasted words.

What I would like to highlight is the last passage of the article, which in my opinion addresses the actual business case of deconstructing stories using the “cost of words” (measurable) versus the “value of words” (subjective).

“On the first day of my first real job in journalism—on the copy desk at the Royal Oak Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, Michigan—the chief copy editor said, “Remember, every word you cut saves the publisher money.” At the time, saving the publisher money didn’t strike me as the world’s noblest ideal. These days, for anyone in journalism, it’s more compelling.”

It is interesting (for me at least) to think of news publishers as speculators whose job is to invest in words. Sometimes you go long and sometimes you go short. The trick is to be long or short on the right things. Whether investor or publisher, that challenge remains.

Highly informative visualization of news consumption on The New York Times website throughout a day in June 2009.

The big yellow rings are access from a desktop and the red rings are access from a mobile device.

Highlights:

1. demand for online news differs from access point to access point.
2. mobile traffic is strong in the morning and in the afternoon when people are going to and from work
3. PC traffic is strongest around lunchtime.
4. mobile demand for news is getting bigger
5. mobile traffic in some countries it is already bigger than PC access.

The New York Times site traffic, World View, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

More details after the jump at The Guardian

Slowly, the winds of change are blowing into newsrooms around the globe.

20minutos.es, a popular Spanish language news website has just hired a full time home page editor “Portadista” that is responsible for the performance of the home page and tracking the most popular stories in each column, using their own software to show real time performance stats.

It may seem like a mundane role, but one that will become the most coveted job in newsrooms around the world in the next few years. The one person that is making decisions in real time about which content gets high visibility and using click data to verify those decisions.

In our discussions with newsrooms of all sizes over the past 12 months, it is clear there is a large market demand for real time data that can direct editorial choices, optimal link placement and measure real time story performance metrics.

The only thing that has been slowing adoption down is the lack of software to do this at scale (this is where our real time web analytics service buzzflow™ comes in) and hiring the proper staff to manage real time editorial management on websites. Both of these things are changing quickly.

I managed to find a fuzzy screen cap of what seems to be a one hour view of link performance on the home page of 20minutos.es. You can see the head and long tail of links and images that were clicked on and in what amount over the course of 60 minutes.

Real time data driven newsrooms are here to stay and this is going to be a very exciting space to play in for content and analytics freaks such as ourselves. Plus, who wouldn’t want the job title of “Portadista” on their business card, way cooler than mine.

I was meeting with the folks at The Guardian a few days ago and an interesting question was thrown out on the table asking if the presentation of online news can provide a competitive advantage over time. This could be quantified in several ways including attracting new users, longer time spent on site, more click throughs on articles or higher ad payouts for new layouts.

The main concern was that even if money and time is invested in coming up with new and innovative ways to present online news, it is so easy to copy, that the advantage would be short lived. What is more valuable investing in content creation or content display?

They are one in the same in my opinion and both have to be brilliant to win.

My feeling is that innovative news displays are mandatory to differentiate content and engage users. Good ideas will always be nabbed, copied and most of the time improved upon. But that is the nature of service innovation and not doing something new for fear of it being copied means you will just miss out on delivering new readership opportunities. Some that will suck and some that will work.

I am going to use the New York Times Skimmer service as an example of an offering that attempts to display the same underlying article set in different ways. Although there are 7 unique displays for the Skimmer service, three somewhat unique ones are shown below using the Dealbook blog content:

Lines Display

Fridge Display

Flow Display