Gawker Media’s web measurement of choice is shifting from pageviews to unique users. That’s a pretty big deal for an organization that led the charge in pageview obsession. Gawker founder Nick Denton explained the refocusing in a staff memo:
The target is called “US monthly uniques.” It represents a measure of each site’s domestic audience. This [...]

It’s hard to put a good face on this kind of news; in fact, it reminds me of the old “bus plunge” meme. The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) reports that newspaper circulation for the six months ending Sept. 30 dropped 10.6 percent from the same period in 2008 (7.5 percent on Sundays).
And this is [...]

Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of Talking Points Memo, just spoke by webcam to a conference at Kent State University, and it was a revealing discussion. He said that TPM’s readership is now at 1.8 million unique visitors per month, which is up from the 1.5 million he told me in July. “We’ve had [...]

Recent posts by Patricia Handschiegel, Amy Gahran, Dana Chinn, and Bill Grueskin have driven home a crucial point about online journalism: Traffic and page views are nice, but engaged readers and loyal audiences are more important. Here, I’d like to point out a new tool that builds on that notion.
Even on the infinitely measurable web, [...]

[We're doing another Lab Book Club this week and next, on Bill Wasik's And Then There's This. Today, Ian Crouch summarizes and reviews the book's arguments; we'll have more excerpts from our interview with Wasik in the coming days. —Josh]
Bill Wasik’s And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture deceptively slim [...]

If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in [...]