IN my 40-odd years of journalism, the biggest change has not been the obvious one: the leap from battered old typewriters that still worked after being thrown out of windows during office parties to snazzy laptops where you can file copy from anywhere.
Nor has it been other technological marvels such as cellphones that even takes videos so I can live-stream events – unlike reporting on, say, the Dusi when I had to kick tickey-boxes in the Umgeni valley to get a line three decades ago.
No, the biggest change is what the British public considered ‘news’ on websites these days.
For example, last week we put up the GCSE school exam results and were expecting good traffic as thousands of kids come from our news catchment area.
So they would all be logging on to see how their schools were doing – right?
Well, not really. Instead of GCSEs, the most-read story was about spiders the size of mice invading Brit homes.
We had a picture of said spiders and all I can say is that Brit mice must be quite small. The story didn’t even have serious shock-horror value as the arachnids’ fangs were not long enough to puncture human skin.
Invasion of the ants
It gets even weirder. The week before, we ran schools’ A-level results that should have been of massive interest to pupils planning on going to university.
Instead the best read story was one on an influx of Argentinian ants that possibly carry salmonella.
This time the shock-horror angle from Argentine was diluted by the fact that most people bin food contaminated by ants, so the risk of a salmonella outbreak was possibly one notch higher than me edging out Brad Pitt for a Hollywood movie role.
I’m not disputing such stories are genuine news; indeed, I put them online myself.
I’m just amazed at how avidly the reading public lapped them up. I reckon that we are so risk averse these days that something which would barely raise a shrug 20 years ago, such as arachnids and ants, are now Halloween scare stories.
However, forget spiders and salmonella, if you want really big web hits, all you need to do is post a shock weather story.
This is pretty easy as there are meteorologists out there who specialise in worst case scenarios and will happily tell you there is a small risk of a tornado emerging from turbulence created by a hot day in Spain.
Even if you run the story saying there is only a 20 percent possibility of this actually happening, there’s still a spike in website traffic.
Traffic volume
Before the days of digital journalism you would be laughed off the streets if your weatherman predicted a tornado and not a leaf stirred. But like it or not, that’s the reality of fast-moving web reporting where you live or die by volume of traffic.
You simply cannot ignore those maybe-it-will-happen stories as the public obviously love reading them.
Even worse, headlines that make grumpy old-timers like me cringe such as ‘Is this the cutest baby ever?’ are usually the ones that go viral.
Indeed, when I write a story much effort is spent on the headline. I write one to catch the eye of Internet search engines; one for social media (is this the cutest/biggest/worst etc) and one for our website’s homepage where you can use puns and words that Google doesn’t understand.
For example, our catchment area is Buckinghamshire, but everyone just says Bucks. However, if you use ‘Bucks’ in a search engine headline, Google thinks you are talking about a herd of Kudu and won’t direct the story to the correct audience.
But perhaps our biggest hot news let-down was when we ran a story on a controversial High Speed Rail project being built through a greenbelt in Buckinghamshire.
We also ran, on the same day, a story headlined ‘When do the clocks go forward for summer?’ (Answer – the same as they have always done: the last weekend of March).
Guess what got more traffic?
Right. Which reminds me, it’s time to put up the ‘When do clocks go back for winter’ story.
