The Wardman Wire

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For some time there has been conversation about the need to look at the Quality and Engagement of audiences for media websites.

This article looks at one of the data items available via the Quantcast.com service, which segments your audience by loyalty. The free service can also identify which organisations and businesses are sending visitors to a website.

I look at the data for national newspapers, and also for this site and journalism.co.uk.

Purely in the spirit of being a nasty, vindictive blogger targetting the Mainstream Media because nonsense is sometimes published about “bloggers”, I can report that in the 10 Editorial Days from 19 September 2008 to 30 September 2008 the corrections column of the Guardian contained no fewer than 41 separate items, which comes to around a thousand a year if you multiply it up.

I should note that:

• Some of these are gorgeous spelling errors or typos: “Ordnance Survey, not the Ordinance Survey“, “Mike Harding, not Mark Harding“, “A glotteral stop“.
• Some are funny (and the corrections correspondent has a sense of humour): “It’s not a hospital, but a school for boys, although it did once provide the venue for an episode of Casualty “.
• One looks actionable: “We apologise for unfairly failing to give her an adequate opportunity to respond and for making inaccurate personal references about her.”
• There are a couple of absolute howlers: “Margaret Thatcher was MP for Finchley, not Grantham. She was born and brought up in Grantham.”
• It can take days to publish a correction.
• I am using the Guardian purely because they make the information available in an easily accessible form.
• These corrections are - presumably - ones reported, and do not include columns or articles based on incorrect facts, a vivid imagination or gibberish.

I promised Kristine (good media blog - worth a read) that I’d look at the current mini-spat about the claim that “UK Newspapers run the Best UK Blogs“.

It needs a “kitchen sink” point-by-point post to do a proper response (the claim has some substance, but in my opinion is only half-right), but that will have to wait.