e-commerce & social media

Following on from yesterday’s look at the biggest sites on Facebook during October, here are the publishers that best managed to use Twitter to spread their stories and reach new readers in October.

In September’s Twitter rankings, we asked if October would be the month that the BBC would see more than 4 millions tweets for the first time. The answer, according to data from Spike:Yep, the BBC break the 4 million tweet mark for the first time, Mashable record an impressive 842 average tweets per story throughout October, CNN and the Guardian overtake ABC News to take third and fourth place,

All top ten sites achieve over 1 million tweets, Russia Today enter the charts at 25th....

Via Jeff Domansky

In the last few weeks the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the Ukrainian crisis and the situation in the Gaza Strip are monopolizing media attention....

Last Wednesday the Twitter account of the Associated Press posted this tweet:

The news was verified, the tweet was not wrong from a grammatical point of view, however there was an ambiguity whereby if the word 'crash' is read as a part of the verb 'crashland' rather than as a noun, the meaning becomes the plane which was carrying the bodies of the passengers of the MH17 had crashed. A little later, the account   clarified the misunderstanding, but the damage was done with the tweet wrongly interpreted and already shared by thousands of people,   sparking the most varied reactions.

The episode has prompted Megan Garber of The Atlantic to write a piece about the use of "breaking news" designation. According to Garber, it was not a necessary piece of news to add to many others re-launched as indispensable 'breaking news' (a plane has landed, after all: it is news in an article, in a context, but not breaking news itself). It is useless to engulf the news ecosystem. "The term 'breaking' is quickly losing its meaning," Garber explains, in agreement with what Felix Salmon stated during the last edition of the International Journalism Festival....

Via Jeff Domansky

This week we used Insights data to see how some different business sites are performing on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter during the month of September to yesterday (September 1 to 24).

Business news is hotly discussed in the social space. Some of the most talked about digital news sites of recent times (Business Insider, Quartz) cover business daily, while stalwarts like the Wall Street Journal and Forbes have also made themselves very visible in the new social landscape.

We picked seven prominent sites and ran some queries in our Insights dashboard:

The Financial Times

The Wall Street Journal

Quartz

Business Insider

Harvard Business Review

Forbes

Bloomberg.com

We used the data to analyze the biggest stories by network, the most ‘social’ writers at different sites, and overall site performance. Insights also allowed us to graph their average share counts per story....

Via Jeff Domansky

We don’t typically write about intra-newsroom politics at Nieman Lab, leaving that to Manhattan’s very capable cadre of media reporters. But Abramson’s removal and Dean Baquet’s ascent has apparently inspired someone inside the Times to leak one of the most remarkable documents I’ve seen in my years running the Lab, to Myles Tanzer at BuzzFeed.

It’s the full report of the newsroom innovation team that was given six full months to ask big questions about the Times’ digital strategy. (A summary version of it was leaked last week, but this is the big kahuna.)

Via Jeff Domansky