Andrew Beaujon
May 2, 2013
1:45 pm
Facebook
A case study on Facebook's new
media portal looks at
Slate's rocketing Facebook traffic over the past year. Psychology explains some of the rise: "Slate’s stories frequently have provocative, attention grabbing headlines," Facebook notes. But publishers without Slate's gift for those can benefit from some of the other tips in the study:
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It puts "share" and "like" buttons in a couple of places: One up by the headline, another at the foot.
The share dialog prompts a user to add a comment to the article, creating a strong signal back to Facebook. Slate.com story pages have both Share and Like buttons prominently visible, so readers can choose how they want to post the story to Facebook.
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It makes calls to action: "The descriptive comments from Slate editors often directly solicit feedback from followers."
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Mallary Jean Tenore
Jan. 15, 2013
11:07 am
Slate | Poynter.org
A Slate correction that ran over the weekend is a good reminder to double-check the spelling of names. The correction, at the bottom of a
Troy Patterson story about the TV show "Girls"' second season, reads:
This review misspelled basically everyone’s name. It’s Hannah Horvath, not Hannah Hovrath; Marnie is played by Allison Williams, not Alison Williams; and Ray is played by Alex Karpovsky, not Zosia Mamet.
News Editor Chad Lorenz, who oversees the site's corrections, said via email that the person who edited the story "chose to post that piece himself without filing it to the copy desk, so that probably led to more errors than usual."
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 18, 2012
8:26 am
Jacob Weisberg reacted so swiftly to Forbes reporter Jeff Bercovici's suggestion Friday that Slate
might put in some sort of pay model because "the confusion about paywalls is bad for sites like ours," the Slate Group chairman said when reached by phone Monday.
Slate had a hard time shedding its rep as a pay site for years after
experimenting with a paywall in 1998, Weisberg said. "It took some years for people to stop being confused about it," adding that Salon's "Premium" model a few years later also confused readers "because our names are so similar."
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Andrew Beaujon
Nov. 19, 2012
11:13 am
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Craig Silverman
Mar. 1, 2012
11:29 am
Hat tip to the folks at the great Retraction Watch blog for spotting this notable Slate retraction from Wednesday night:
On Feb. 17, 2012, Slate published an article titled “The Celltex Affair: An Ethics Scandal Strikes the World of Bioethics.” Because of
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Mark Fitzgerald
Nov. 4, 2011
10:25 am
The Washington Post Co.
The Washington Post Co. swung to a loss in the third-quarter as advertising revenue fell for the fourth consecutive period and its one-time cash cow, the Kaplan education unit, reported a steep drop in profits.
Newspaper publishing division revenue declined 9 percent in the quarter to $149.3 million, pushed by a 20 percent decline in print advertising revenue at the flagship Washington Post. The company said its declines were largely due to drops in classified, zoned and general advertising.
Digital dimes are not making up for the print loss in the newspaper division’s online unit, which include the Post Website and Slate. Newspaper online revenue dropped 14 percent in the quarter to $23.3 million. Display online ad revenue plunged 17 percent and online classified dipped 5 percent.
Overall, the Post Co. recorded a third-quarter loss of $6.2 million, or 82 cents a share. That contrasts with a third-quarter 2010 profit of $60.9 million or $6.48 a share.
Wall Street analysts had been expecting the Post Co. to report another profit this quarter, with the average estimate being a profit of $3.85 per share,
according to Wall Street Cheat Sheet. Expect to see the stock (NYSE: WPO) fall on its opening Friday morning.
The Post Co. did exceed analysts expectations on company-wide revenue, which declined 13 percent to $1.03 billion. Wall Street’s expectation had been for a steeper decline of 16 percent to $1 billion.
The Washington Post Co.’s biggest problem these days isn’t the sluggish performance of newspaper advertising, an industry-wide problem – it’s the sudden change in fortunes at its Kaplan education unit.
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Jim Romenesko
Aug. 29, 2011
5:21 pm
Reuters.com |
Poynter Online
Paul Smalera suggests a Slate-Washington Post Co. divorce. "What Slate needs is a CEO, someone who can lead a spinoff, attract venture capital, talent in the engineering, sales and business staffs with the prospects of equity and a clean, er, slate, with which to reinvent the modern online magazine." He'd like to see "a real technologist and business person" like Google News’s
Josh Cohen offered the chance to transform Slate into something venture capitalists like
Fred Wilson,
Chris Sacca and
Reid Hoffman would invest in.
Slate was the original, crazy experiment of its time. It won the fierce loyalty of a generation of readers. But it’s time to re-run the experiment, exploiting the cash-rich, talent-starved startup environment of 2011, and see what the editorial mission of Slate — indeed, of online journalism as a whole — can become over the next 15 years.
Jack Shafer was asked
in today's Poynter chat if Slate restricted what he could say about the operations there, post-layoff? "I am absolutely free to speak my mind about Slate, past, present, and future," he said. "So, yes, if I thought their digestive tract needed a new exit point, I could dig one with a rusty butter knife."
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