How the NYT neglects business journalism

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Reuters: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/15/how-the-nyt-neglects-business-journalism/

How the NYT neglects business journalism
By Felix Salmon
November 15, 2013

Brian Abelson has a fantastic post about the performance of NYT articles. The main gist is that it’s possible to predict with surprising accuracy how many pageviews any given NYT article is going to receive, given just a few variables like the amount of time that article spent on the home page, and whether or not it was tweeted by the main @nytimes Twitter account.

There’s a lot of information in the post, however, and a couple of other things jumped out at me, seeing as how I’m a business journalist for a wire service. The first is the almost hilarious way in which the NYT seems to go out of its way to ensure that readers do not read wire stories on the NYT site, despite the fact that they make up the overwhelming majority of the content on the site.

Abelson put together a database, for this post, of 21,006 stories published on nytimes.com between July and August of this year. Of those 21,006 stories, 15,269 — or 73% — came from wire services (either Reuters or the AP); the other 5,737 were original content. But get this: any given piece of original content had a 21% chance of being tweeted out by @nytimes. A wire story, on the other hand, had only a 0.6% chance of being tweeted by @nytimes. Or, to put it another way, @nytimes tweeted out 1,273 different articles over the course of those two months — and of those articles, just 89 came from wire services.

Abelson says that these numbers make intuitive sense, on the grounds that “stories from the wire should not receive the same promotional energies as those that come from journalists working at the Times”. But I’m not sure what kind of work the word “should” is doing in that sentence. Is he saying that wire stories don’t deserve to be brought to the attention of the NYT’s readers? That, to a first approximation, only 0.6% of wire stories are likely to rise the exalted standards of @nytimes, while a full 21% of original stories do? Is he saying that the NYT has a good business reason to promote its own stories over those which originated elsewhere? Or is he just saying that news organizations should look after their own, and that it would be somehow disloyal for @nytimes to tweet out many stories which were written by wire journalists, even if those tweets were links to the NYT website?

Much more at link. Good analysis.