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March 11, 2013, 12:18 p.m.
LINK: jimromenesko.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   March 11, 2013

wsj-daypart

Dayparting is nothing new for broadcasters, but for newspapers, it’s still often hard to match up journalists’ output with the consumption patterns of the audience. Print-centric workflows still lead to a lot of stories being filed and published later in the day, despite online news readership being stronger in the morning.

This chart from The Wall Street Journal’s Raju Narisetti (via Romenesko) is an excellent visualization of that. Raju:

The green line in the chart below is when readers come to us looking for the terrific journalism WSJ promises them, as measured in the % of daily readers who come, each hour.

The blue line was when we were publishing our stories, by the hour, in 2011-12.

The red line shows how all of you moved the needle significantly in recent months to get more of your great journalism to your audiences when more of them were looking for it on our site.

Times in the chart are all Eastern, despite the WSJ’s global reach. Note what used to be a spike in story publishing from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. — the traditional newspaper time for copy to move — is now somewhat more even through late morning and early afternoon.

Would be curious to see these numbers for the WSJ’s tablet and smartphone offerings, since mobile device peak consumption times actually line up pretty well with the old newspaper timetable. And don’t forget our Q&A with Raju from last week.

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