Jeff Sonderman
Jeff Sonderman (jsonderman@poynter.org) is the Digital Media Fellow at The Poynter Institute. He focuses on innovations and strategies for mobile platforms and social media in online news.
He previously has worked as the senior community host and managing editor of TBD.com, a local news website in Washington, D.C., and WJLA.com, the website of D.C.-area news station ABC7. Prior to that he was the internet content director and metro editor of The Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pa., and also spent years reporting on health care, business and transportation.
Find ways to follow him at jeffsonderman.com/connect
Jeff Sonderman
May 10, 2012
12:04 pm
AddThis |
Washington Post |
Business Insider
AddThis, the company that makes the social-sharing buttons embedded on millions of Web pages, released some new plugins Wednesday that news sites might start to make use of. One is a “
welcome bar” that greets visitors to your site who come from certain social networks or other websites. You can ask users referred by Twitter to follow you, or those from Facebook to share the page with their friends. The words, appearance and button action are completely customizable. The company also launched new widgets for
"follow us" links and for listing the
most-shared content on your site.
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Jeff Sonderman
May 9, 2012
11:51 am
Bitly, the URL shortener of choice for most people, has analyzed its click-tracking data to find the
optimal days and times for posting links to social media. The results show interesting, distinct patterns among Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.
On Twitter, the best window is 1 to 3 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. Facebook was hot at 1 to 4 p.m. And Tumblr is a night owl, with posts doing best after 7 p.m. See the charts below for the full breakdown from Bitly.
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Jeff Sonderman
May 8, 2012
9:53 am
Emerging evidence suggests the
sudden decline in usage of Facebook news apps is a symptom of the social network's varied experiments in promoting reading activity in users' main News Feeds.
On Monday I questioned
what could have happened in mid-April to simultaneously and similarly disrupt so many of these frictionless-sharing apps.
Ryan Kellett at the Washington Post and
Josh Constine of TechCrunch both blame it on Facebook's shift from a big "recently read articles" module that listed five headlines read by friends, to a small "trending articles" box that shows only one headline at a time.
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Jeff Sonderman
May 7, 2012
4:21 pm
Something strange is happening in the world of Facebook's frictionless sharing apps.
News apps that automatically share a user's reading activity with their friends lost huge amounts of active users in April, according to AppData.com tracking.
Forbes' Jeff Bercovici first reported the
trend for The Washington Post's Social Reader, whose monthly active users fell to 9.2 million from 17.4 million in the past 30 days. It's daily active users (second chart below) tanked even harder.
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Jeff Sonderman
May 7, 2012
12:29 pm
Technology Review
Jason Pontin's
latest column is perhaps the most simultaneously complete and concise summary of publishers' disappointment with mobile apps.
When Apple released the iPad in April 2010, the Technology Review publisher writes, "traditional publishers had been overtaken by a collective delusion. They believed that mobile computers with large, colorful screens, such as the iPad, iPhone, and similar devices using Google's Android software, would allow them to unwind their unhappy histories with the Internet."
But after setting foot in the new world of apps, Pontin writes, "like almost all publishers, I was badly disappointed. What went wrong? Everything." (Read on for
his blow-by-blow account.)
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Jeff Sonderman
Apr. 30, 2012
12:15 pm
comScore
New research from comScore shows that "while political blogs and sites may attract a good amount of visitors from across party lines, they are still more likely to regularly engage visitors who share the same views." Among the sites studied, Politico has the most balanced audience with 29 percent of readers identified as Democrats and the same percentage identified as Republicans. Daily Kos has the highest percentage of Independents, 46 percent of their readers. The political affiliation is based on voter registration.
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- Political news sites draw visitors from diverse political leanings. (comScore chart)
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Jeff Sonderman
Apr. 30, 2012
11:23 am
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Jeff Sonderman
Apr. 30, 2012
9:59 am
Rapid changes in digital journalism and its audiences have inspired a lot of research. Much of that research measures
how much things have changed, or describes
the latest state of affairs.
But where’s the research that tells us
what to do about it?
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Tow Foundation are hoping to fill that gap, by giving Columbia School of Journalism $2 million to fund what you might call “applied research in journalism” -- studies that not only describe what’s happening, but prescribe the best practices for journalists to follow.
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Jeff Sonderman
Apr. 29, 2012
10:54 am
Fox News |
Politico |
C-SPAN
At Saturday night's annual White House Correspondents Dinner, the comedic host for the evening, Jimmy Kimmel, got in some good shots. The media-related jokes, among many
collected by Politico, included:
"Where are the CNN tables? Are the CNN tables real tables or virtual tables?"
"Did Rupert Murdoch hack into all my jokes already?"
"I'd like everyone to look under their seats. You'll find a copy of Keith Olbermann's resume." (Olbermann retorted on Twitter.)
President Barack Obama mostly used his speech to poke fun at political rivals and himself, but couldn't resist some media jokes in a room full of journalists.
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Jeff Sonderman
Apr. 26, 2012
10:51 am
The Awl |
Calbuzz |
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Twitter's detractors are mounting a spring offensive.
Choire Sicha had a revelation Wednesday as he watched journalists live-tweet Rupert Murdoch's testimony: “Who gamed a substantial number of professional news-gatherers into
providing free content for Twitter?”
"We saw a seemingly endless number of journalists spend the very early hours frantically live-tweeting every possibly interesting bit (and plenty not) of Rupert Murdoch's testimony... It certainly wasn't helping them get their news articles published in a more timely fashion! And it not only didn't result in any revenue for their news organization, it didn't even result in any revenue for the writer in the course of his job duties."
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