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January 11, 2008
Out From Behind the Wall
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial page ran a story titled “WSJ.com/opinion” with a sub-head “A free editorial page lunch.” In short, the Journal’s editorial page is coming out from behind the wall, through the merging of OpinionJournal.com and WSJ.com/opinion.
At lunch today with Gordon Crovitz, who stepped down recently as publisher of The Wall Street Journal but will continue to write a column for the editorial page, I learned that WSJ.com has 10 million unique visitors a month. They are going to the public home page which offers short story blurbs, to the 20 vertical blogs on law, health, real estate and careers and to feature content such as the Juggle on managing a career and a family. One of the most popular spots on WSJ.com is James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today, now in its sixth year, which comments on and aggregates news.
I learned from my discussions with beat reporters at the Journal that 70% of the time is spent on reporting, about 30% on writing, 10% on recording video and 20% on blogging. These numbers add up to more than 100% because there is some overlap, between content creation and dissemination.
The key question is how public relations must change alongside the evolution of mainstream media. We can still do the time-honored media relations, in which we propose stories, arrange interviews with clients and third party experts. But we can also now point mainstream media to important posts by bloggers or to content posted by companies that is high quality and easily accessed (such as video).
So let’s say that you are at a PR firm representing a diabetes drug. The mainstream media has been reluctant to cover the category. You come across this interesting blog written by Amy Tenderich, a Bay Area resident and a Type One Diabetes patient, called DiabetesMine.com. You see that she wrote a letter to Steve Jobs which sparked the design of a next generation diabetes measurement gadget. You learn that it attracts 30,000 unique visitors a month. So you offer Amy an interview with the doctor running the important clinical trial with a human interest angle with a few of the patients who have benefited. Amy posts and you are off and running in the long tail. Note a few recent posts: http://www.diabetesmine.com/2007/09/where-healthcar.html and http://www.diabetesmine.com/2007/09/health-20-a-mov.html. Scott Hensley, the WSJ health blogger, picks up on the story for his blog and you are working in a new media-eco system.
We are operating in a world of the Venn diagram, the intersection of circles, where patients are bloggers and prominent media taps into the vox populi. The walled gardens are crumbling but great media brands still matter, especially when they open the way for consumer generated content as part of the discussion. I would appreciate your input as always.
Posted by Edelman at January 11, 2008 4:03 PM
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Comments
For anyone like myself that attended CES this past week, they will be the first people to tell you how important blogs and new media is today. I'd say more than 50% of the journalists at the event were bloggers, but also many of the mainstream representatives from top-tier publications also noted at various times how they had seen information on such and such a product written about on X blog or X Web site. We as an industry really need to think of ways to better explore this medium and communicate with our clients the importance of blogs. It really is to our benefit to explore these opportunities in addition to traditional media outlets.
Best regards,
Andrew
PR Exec (NYC)
Posted by: Andrew at January 14, 2008 5:13 PM