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In our newspaper study, released earlier today, we developed a formula we call the Twitter Interactivity Quotient (or Twitter IQ for short) as a way of measuring how newspapers were using their accounts.   If tweeting, which consists of original tweets, responses to tweets, and retweeting others’ tweets, is viewed as a conversation, then the tweeting is effectively “talking”, while responses and retweets are evidence of “listening”. And, while not every conversation is equally balanced for a variety of good reasons, it seems reasonable to propose that the best conversationalists are those who cultivate balance over time.

Working off that premise, we combined the percentage of replies and retweets (listening) and subtracted it from 50 percent (a perfect balance). We then subtracted that number from 100% and translated it into a real number between .5 and 1.5, establishing “1” as the ideal balance. Accounts registering a .5 only tweet, accounts registering a 1.5 only reply and retweet, but they are equally out of balance in different directions. The Twitter IQ is the difference between an account’s “balance” and “1”. As such, in an ironic flourish, the lower one’s Twitter IQ, the better. The combined Twitter IQ employed in ranking the newspapers’ is simply the sum of the three applicable accounts. Below is a list of the newspapers who had the best aggregate Twitter IQ scores, meaning the three accounts we examined had the best overall balance between listening and talking. Please note that these results should be taken with a grain of salt, as we didn’t look at every single Twitter account for each newspaper.

Here is the list of the specific accounts we looked at that have the best Twitter IQ scores.

See our full rankings of the newspapers in aggregate, and the individual accounts themselves, at the link below.

• Newspaper Twitter IQ Rankings
• Newspaper Accounts Twitter IQ Rankings

Update: We decided to remove the list of the lowest ranking accounts, since it wasn’t our intention to bring negative attention to those with low scores.

Twitter was seemingly everywhere in 2009, with sports stars, celebrities, politicians and journalists using the micro blogging platform to promote everything from themselves to their employers to the issues they advocate for.    After several years of assessing the general online presence of the top 100 U.S. newspapers, this year we decided to produce a study specifically about how newspapers and journalists are utilizing Twitter as a way of promoting their content and interacting with readers. Frankly, this was a daunting task.  There are thousands of newspaper-related Twitter profiles, from official accounts of the paper overall to more personal profiles maintained by individual journalists.  Given the pure volume of accounts, we decided to closely analyze 300 profiles from the top 100 newspapers in the country as a way of getting a sense, in aggregate, of how the media is utilizing Twitter.  Among the things we look at in the study are whether newspapers link to their Twitter accounts from their website, how often, and in what manner, the accounts are updated, and whether newspapers are using their Twitter profiles to interact with readers or to simply promote their site content. While the study isn’t perfect, the results provide a compelling jumping-off point for additional thought and discussion.  Following are some key findings and a link to the full study. Top Line Stats

• We were able to find multiple Twitter accounts for all of the top 100 newspapers using common sense searching techniques. However, only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website. In many cases, these links were buried on the site and difficult to track down. In addition, this means 38% of the newspapers are actively using Twitter, but haven’t yet integrated their presence with their website in even a minimal way.
• 56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website. This directory from the Los Angeles Times is a good example of the form these listings usually took. Many of these directories were quite extensive, listing dozens of accounts.
• Of the 300 Twitter profiles we looked at in depth, the average account had 17,717 followers and followed back 1,470 other users. However, if you remove the four accounts we looked at that had over 100,000 followers, the average number of followers drops to a much more modest 3,447 users.
• The Twitter profiles of the newspapers send out an average of 11 tweets per day. Tweet frequency varies from 1.1 (The Boston Globe's Big Picture, The Denver Post's Woody Paige, and The Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets/day (The Boston Herald).
• 51% of Twitter accounts were updated primarily through Twitter’s web interface. The next most popular method with 28% was Twitterfeed, which is a service that automatically posts updates to Twitter accounts via RSS feeds. The remaining 21% of accounts were updated via a variety of other Twitter tools such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. This indicates that the vast majority of Twitter accounts (around 70%) are updated by staff members as opposed to a simply being an automated feed.

Replies and Retweets While these core statistics are interesting, we wanted to take things further and see how exactly the Twitter accounts were being used. Were the accounts simply linkbots highlighting newspaper content, or were they being used to by the paper to hold a conversation with its readers? Were newspapers simply talking, or were they listening, too? Some key findings on this front:

• Many of the accounts we looked at rarely if ever interacted with other users by replying to tweets. Indeed, 33% of the accounts we looked at replied to users in less than 1% of their tweets. 15% of the accounts we looked at had never replied to another users tweets. This suggests that these papers are rarely reading or reacting to the updates of people they follow.
• On the positive side, 37% of newspaper accounts we looked at replied to users in more than 10% of their tweets. 5% of accounts replied to other Twitter users in over 50% of their tweets.
• Similarly, many of the accounts we looked at rarely retweeted other users. 43% of the accounts we looked at retweeted others in less than 1% of their tweets. 23% of the accounts we looked at never retweeted another user during the time period we considered.
• 16% of the Twitter accounts we looked at retweeted other users in more than 10% of their tweets.

Please also check out this post, which goes into detail about Twitter IQ, our ranking of the level of interactivity of the Twitter accounts. The Full Study The full study is available for download here and is also embedded below for your convenience.  You can also view the back up data for the study at the URLs below:

• Raw data
• Newspaper Twitter IQ Rankings
• Newspaper Accounts Twitter IQ Rankings

We would love for readers to use the data as a jumping off point for additional analysis, and just ask that you reference The Bivings Group in whatever you produce. The Use of Twitter by America's Newspapers

In the past we have profiled the innovative work of people like Adrian Holovaty who does some exciting things through programming that allow data to tell their own stories.  For instance, he set up the Campaign Tracker for the Washington Post, and he is now running his own site Everyblock – the database driven hyperlocal news site.  Further, in our newspaper studies we have examined how news organizations use the Internet.

While at the CIO Perspectives Forum here in Washington, DC last week, I was wondering about what kind of role CIOs should play at news organizations.  Their organizations may already use them as I am thinking (at least I hope).  However, it is important to note that in an October 2008 white paper titled “The CIO Profession: Leaders of change, drivers of innovation” IBM reports that most organizations mainly view and use CIOs as implementers and not as strategists.  Hopefully, news organizations turn to CIOs for planning and strategy and not just technical execution.  Of course, a CIO with a journalism background could help even more; Adrian Holovaty is so innovatively partly since he has a background in both programming and journalism.

If CIOs are involved in strategic planning, they can help the business and editorial staffers not only understand what is realistic, but they can also introduce them to new ideas that someone without technical expertise would know.  Further, a CIO could also identify potential problems and other issues in advance and help either avoid them or prepare other organizational stakeholders in advance. 

Here are a few examples of how a CIO can help news organizations strategically plan: 

• Broadcast journalists are now going out to the field with recording and editing equipment with fewer producers and camera people accompanying them.  Before such equipment and software is purchased, the CIO could help determine the requirements for such equipment and software and then help identify applicable products.
• A CIO with a decent understanding of database management could help find new application ideas like the ones that Adrian Holovaty has developed.
• During our newspaper studies we look at the website features that news organizations use by examining the different features (i.e. blogs, RSS feeds, video sections, etc.) they harness.  A CIO would have a valuable perspective on helping developing a strategic plan on what the organization’s website should do. Further, he or she she can help evaluate content management systems (CMS), applications, and vendors to determine how well they meet the organization’s needs and desires.
• A CIO can help an organization envision and deploy an API – like NPR’s API — which allows members of the public to use its data in interesting ways that the organizations itself did not image.  This is one way that a CIO can work with the business and editorial people at a news organization to help them find ways to profitably exploit an API.
• The CIO could help find ways to organize content for the public in many different ways.  For instance, tagging enables people to find information in ways other than the traditional divisions like News, Sports, International, etc.  In fact, The Guardian newspaper wanted a tag editor back in October 2007.  This would help make the news organization’s site more easy for the public to use.

These are just a few examples of aspects of journalism in which news organizations can turn to their CIOs for strategic planning, and considering the dire state of media companies, they can use all of the help that they can get.

How else can news organizations harness their CIOs to help strategically plan?

On the heels of an overhaul of their print product back in October, the Los Angeles Times launched a redesign of their website a week or so ago.  I like the new www.latimes.com a great deal from a usability standpoint.  The new sites prominent, simplified horizontal nav bar is a huge improvement over the more complicated content structure present on the old site.  And while I’m sure some will find the black and white design unexciting, I think the palette evokes the print product and makes it easy for the eye to focus on the content.  This is a nice improvement.

Check out the screenshots below to see how the site has changed.  Click on the images for full before and after shots.

Like many others, I occasionally use Compete and Alexa data to compare traffic of websites whose logs I don’t have access to.  I know these services are imperfect, but a comparison I ran today of NYTimes.com vs. USAToday.com vs. WashingtonPost.com shows just how anecdotal the data from these services is.

Below are the results of a comparison of the three sites from Compete for the last year.  According to Compete, USA Today gets more unique visitors than the New York Times.  My gut tells me this is completely wrong.  While I’ve read my share of issues of USA Today on airplanes and at hotels, it is unfathomable to me that its website is more popular than NYTimes.com.

So I went over to Alexa and did a similar comparison to dramatically different results.  The New York Times is well ahead of both the Post and USA Today in terms of Daily Reach, with USA Today actually trailing the Post by a small margin. To put this in perspective, Compete is reporting that USA Today gets around twice the traffic as Alexa is reporting.  So this discrepancy isn’t within any normally accepted margin of error.

To me, the Alexa result feels rights, and a look at the Nielsen data makes me semi confident that my gut instinct is more correct than Compete.  However, the Nielsen data routinely comes under criticism itself, as does that of competing service Comscore.

The fact of the matter is that the only way to track site usage with any precision is through log files, which the firms providing these numbers don’t have access to.  No one has truly figured out to track overall web usage accurately as of yet, so we should all remember to take these numbers with a huge grain of salt.  Even when the the stats you get back match your working hypothesis, as the Alexa numbers do in my USA Today vs. NYTimes vs. WashingtonPost.com comparison.

Back in January I started the Master of Information Management program at the University of Maryland, and one of my classes this semester was about information policy. One of the main assignments was to write an issue brief about a contemporary topic, and my classmate Ryan Sydlik and I focused on the new Associated Press initiative, launched in April this year, to better protect its intellectual property from online content scrapers.

Our AP Intellectual Property brief (click to access the report) is posted in The Bivings Group research section where we post our other research. This brief compliments our studies about how the news media uses the Internet.

In our brief we discuss:

• the tactics that the AP has announced it will use to protect its intellectual property,
• how companies like Google and Yahoo! fit into this controversy,
• how the current economic downturn has exacerbated the needs for news organizations to protect their intellectual property,
• the importance of "The Link Economy" that the AP is taking a risk of upsetting, and
• how fair use and DMCA notices might play into the AP's legal strategy.

The Bivings Group took another look at The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers , and compiled a list of 2008’s top ten Newspaper sites. Newspapers selected were among the 100 largest in the U.S., and in addition to being judged by their abundance of web features, were graded on design and easy usability. Check out last year’s list to see who’s staying strong Online.

1. The New York Times
The New York Times site manages to combine classic style with managing a frequent onslaught of new web features, and dropping the site’s pricey “Times Select” has helped to expand the Times’ already massive Online readership. Recent additions include “Times Extra,” which aggregates headlines from other news outlets and adds them to each section.
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Last Thursday, we released the 2009 edition of our newspaper study.  There was some great commentary about the study around the blogosphere.  The general reaction was relief that newspaper website are getting better, but a sense that whatever they do probably won’t be enough.  Below are few of the more interesting points folks made.

ReadWriteWeb:

Mainstream news will never be the same again. You can now talk back to it, take part in it and interact with it along with countless other sources of information. Just as no software company can produce content or code as well as a world of users and developers collaborating can, so too can newspapers no longer keep us sufficiently informed all on their own. It’s nice to see they aren’t trying to anymore. These are changes for the better and show that while old media institutions are struggling to hold on to revenue in the face of the internet challenge, the fight is also doing them a lot of good at the same time.

Brian Solis:

Newspapers are are experimenting with social tools to source and share information and also to create and cultivate an active community that connects the media property to various micro communities. Unfortunately, for many, experimentation through socialization doesn’t necessarily provide a newspaper bailout (#newspaperbailout) plan. Like in anything related to the Social Web, an outbound, community-focused champion or team of evangelists, in addition to a more social platform, is required to simply compete.

TechCrunch (check out this graph):

Newspapers are still lurching their way around the Web, a new study finds, but at least they are making some progress. The Bivings Group released a study today that quantifies the Website features of the top 100 newspapers in the U.S. Among the findings: Nearly every newspaper site has reporter-written blogs and some form of video; features that elicit content from readers are on the rise; podcasts and mandatory registrations are down; social networking features are pretty much non-existent.

My take: Just a few years ago many newspapers had formal policies in place against linking to external sites, had all their content locked up behind some sort of registration wall and literally none of them had the community features that blogs have included from the beginning. Newspapers now acknowledge that there is a world outside their walled gardens and are participating in it. That is an impressive change when you consider where they started from. However, it is hard not to think that the current model is really beyond saving and that more drastic measures are needed. To survive, they are going to need to actually get ahead of the curve (like the Las Vegas Sun) instead of simply adding blog-style features to their websites two year after they’ve become industry standards.