More Than a Dinkus, she’s a Superstar!

The Nine Network was once accused of hording their TV stars, banking them even when they had no permanent on-air role. And so it is with newspapers, as they push the production boundaries of their own starlets, using websites to leverage individual talents beyond the commodity of general news.

Let’s face it, when breakings news (including investigative journalism) becomes even less frequent, mastheads need to differentiate themselves beyond news gathering, pushing instead the “jagged and shiny”, including controversial and titillating opinion pieces.

So who are these soap box stars, who pontificate on the day’s proceedings, or worst, stare into our soul to reveal primal urges and motivations?

Content analysis of staff bloggers on the Sydney Morning Herald, including the level of interaction and response they generate from readers, suggests some notables. Equally, the analysis shows the types of content which ‘performs’ well. In the six month period between July and December 2007, more than 39,000 reader responses were recorded. The top 50 posts alone generated almost 14,000 responses.

Of those top 50 staff posts, 45% of all reader responses focused on ‘life & leisure’, with authors such as Samantha Brett and Sam de Brito completly dominating the category. Sports accounted for 36%, with Ben Willing playing a major contribution. These two categories were followed by ‘travel’ (9.4%), ‘entertainment’ (4.8%), ‘technology’ (2.8%) and ‘news’ (1.3%).

Articles such as ‘movies that men cry’ and ‘is admitting you need a a man (or woman) taboo?’ generate fantastic response rates - 392 and 375 reader responses respectively. In fact of the top 50 posts, the average number of responses was 278, compared with an average of 44 across all posts over the six months. In sport, the top posts included ‘Australia v England (rugby union) with 833 responses (the highest of any post in that period) and the A-League Round 7 preview (410 reponses).

Content snapshots like this provide insights into the future of editoral design and development - not positive if you value opinion peices of a more cerebral nature. These insights extend to how buyers and planners need to more accurately assess the value of opinion writers, paying greater attention to reader response rates (i.e. engagement) and less emphasis on audience numbers (i.e. browsers).