Mark Higginson

Manifesto
How attention flows on the web

 

05 August 2014

We have seen a huge increase in Facebook traffic, an area where we hadn’t been focusing. It had previously been all about Twitter. Journalists are all on Twitter, and obsessed with it, so that is where the energy had gone. An assumption had been made without looking at data.

Facebook and fewer stories behind rise in web traffic, says Telegraph chief

Remarkable. Facebook has over five times the active user base of Twitter and yet the Telegraph Media Group’s editor-in-chief says they didn’t look at the data. I would also worry that he seems to see the two as equivalent; if you chase ‘traffic’ your thinking narrows to the point of only seeing the numbers. Yet he also states “the goal is to maintain a quality product”. This is contradictory in so many ways, not least of which is the equating of ‘journalism as product’.

Let me know what you think on Twitter