As brands foray into creating content, it’s helpful to learn from media experts who have been launching journalism brands for years and know how to develop an audience and construct stories.

The Content Strategist spoke with Elizabeth Spiers, former editor of The New York Observer, who helped launch Gawker and Flavorwire and now consults with early-stage startups, about how to create strong content and navigate grey areas in the overlap of journalism and brand writing.

What do news publications need to do to adapt to digital? Any publication you see doing it really well?

I think that even now there’s still a lot of trepidation in the industry about web journalism cannibalizing print, and in most cases, the web and print versions of the same publications have completely different audiences. If everyone internalized this, you’d see more journalists breaking news as the story develops and then synthesizing it into longer pieces for print.

But there’s still a tendency in traditional journalism to save the breaking news for the longer print piece, which I believe is a mistake. Even monthlies need to think like breaking news operations on the web.

I’m biased because I work with them, but I recently did a long feature on Groupon for Fast Company scheduled for the May issue. After Andrew Mason got fired in late February, I asked if I could do an intermediary piece for the web (I had the last interview with him before it happened) and they instantly understood what I wanted to do. It didn’t change the thrust of the print piece, but we had something that was relevant and timely on the web the day after Mason’s firing.

My editor, David Lidsky, was up late with the web editors Noah Robischon and Tyler Gray trying to get the draft I banged out in a few hours into shape for the next morning — which something you’d expect at a daily newspaper, but is much rarer at a monthly magazine.

You’ve been behind the launch of several media sites — any tips for setting tone and building an audience?

I think it’s important to have a distinctive tone. I was a big fan of the old SPY magazine and part of what I loved about it was that you could remove the branding and the bylines and still be able to identify a SPY story as a SPY story.

The biggest mistake people make when they launch something new is not understanding their audience.

There are formulas that work — slideshows of cats will probably never fade in popularity. But when, soon enough, every site in existence is doing slideshows of cats, you need a differentiating factor.

The biggest mistake people make when they launch something new is not understanding their audience — who they are and what they want. So they create a product that’s advertising-friendly but not appealing to readers.

And growing advertising and audience is not a chicken-and-egg problem. You absolutely have to have the audience first.

What tips do you have for writers who want to improve skills and begin freelancing for major publications — anything wrong with foraying into content marketing or writing for brands? 

I think it’s irrelevant. Freelance journalists have been doing technical and marketing writing since the beginning of time to make ends meet.

I think most would prefer more literary endeavors — book editing, ghostwriting, etc., but not everyone has that range of choices.

As long as there’s no conflict of interest — meaning you’re not writing marketing content for a company you’re also covering — I don’t see a problem with it.

Occasionally journalists will go on to work for a tech company, perhaps after covering the company they now work for. Do you have any concerns with journalistic integrity?

This isn’t new either. Every beat has a revolving door. I think you just notice it more in tech because it’s a sexier industry and big exits could mean big money for people who make the jump.

But journalistic integrity boils down to the individual and if someone’s willing to be corrupted, it’s probably not just the possibility of a job in the industry that’s a problem.

Good journalism is about letting the reporting drive the narrative.

And the beat reporters that have it the worst in terms of potential conflict are the media reporters — everyone you cover could offer you a job and there’s an almost 100% chance that eventually, you’ll end up working for a publication you’ve written about. But if you go into the beat knowing that you want to work in the industry you’re covering, it’s probably a bad sign.

I did the reverse — I worked in finance and tech before I ever did anything that would be considered journalism and I don’t have any curiosity about what’s on the other side because I already know.

I’d never cover a company I wanted to work for. I don’t want anything to bias me going in, and I think I’m fairly aware of my biases.

I think good journalism is about letting the reporting drive the narrative, and if, godforbid, you have a palpable need to be liked by your subject, you should probably get out of journalism.

You’re writing a novel — what journalistic skills carry over to fiction, and what initiated the project?

I don’t think it’s the same for everybody, but I learned how to construct a tight narrative via journalism. There are questions that you ask in journalism – Where is the dramatic tension? Is the lede/beginning of the story compelling? What motivates the subject? — that are equally applicable to fiction writing.

That said, fiction writing scratches a different itch for me. It’s less formulaic and you can be more experimental but it’s harder in many ways because you don’t have tight, obvious parameters.

Any content/editing pet peeves?

This is a beginner problem, but I’ve often had reporters file stories that were really just a chronological assemblage of their notes. You have to think about storytelling and not just whether you managed to get all the facts on the page.

And this is also a beginner problem, but understanding when it is appropriate to insert yourself into the story is something that seems to be learned over time. I think this happens largely because we put the giants of new journalism on a pedestal and don’t understand that crowbarring in your own experience of what happened does not necessarily make you Gay Talese.

You have to think about storytelling and not just whether you managed to get all the facts on the page.

If there is a compelling reason for you to insert yourself — you’re interviewing a famous cannibal and he tries to eat you, for example — that’s completely fine. If it’s a stunt journalism piece or a personal essay, it’s not only fine, but necessary.

But informing the reader of your every minute feeling during the interview ignores the fact that the reader doesn’t know who you are and doesn’t inherently care about your opinion. (Unless you actually are Gay Talese, and then I’ll concede that the reader might take the byline into consideration.) The reader cares about the subject and the story. Only insert yourself if it’s additive to the story.

Performance pay can be smart because it invests journalists in the business metrics that publishers care about, ensuring that everyone is working towards the same goal.

Gawker’s Big Board, which hangs prominently in the Gawker’s headquarters tracking the top performing stories, has long been lauded as a key to the success of Nick Denton’s publishing empire. Even old school publishers like Forbes have embraced performance pay.

So does performance pay make sense for brand publishing? Let’s examine some of the pros and cons.

PRO: You’ll get your writers invested in your brand publishing efforts.

A lot of times, brand journalists feel like mercenaries: willing to trade their skills for cash, but not truly invested in the project at hand.

Adding performance incentive to pay can make brand journalists much more invested in the project’s success, and more likely to promote their branded work to their social graph and other audiences.

CON: Brand publishers have different success metrics than media publishers.

For most media publishers, traffic is paramount, since they’re running an ad-based business. As a result, publishers often most value content that performs well in search engines and generates shares on social media, since new visitors are usually acquired through SEO and social.

While brand publishers want the pieces they publish to perform well on social and search, they probably don’t want that to be the top priority of their brand journalists. The tone, message, and quality of the piece is significantly much more important. After all, Gawker can make a traffic push by publishing an edgy post featuring a celebrity’s topless tweet and get a big traffic win. If HSBC does the same thing, they might get a lot of traffic, but it’ll be a big disaster.

PRO: Your journalists will be more likely to tell you when an assignment is a bad idea.

If a brand journalist’s pay is tied into how well her piece performs, she’ll be much more likely to speak up when you give her a boring assignment that likely won’t perform very well. Instead of just banging out the piece and pocketing the cash, she’ll suggest an improved alternative.

CON: Performance pay will scare some journalists off.

For journalists, performance pay at Gawker — which has SEO juice and a huge audience/social following — is one thing; performance pay at an upstart branded magazine is another thing all together. How does a journalist know that their posts will receive any traffic at all? Some will think that they’re being set up for failure.

In addition, some journalists are simply promoting their branded work to their own social networks, which performance pay encourages. You definitely don’t want to miss out on top talent because of performance pay.

The takeaway

Performance pay can definitely provide brand journalists with incentives that will boost their productivity, but it can also raise serious issues. Brands that want to experiment with performance pay should make it a small percentage of overall pay (5-10%) and give brand journalists the option of a flat rate without performance pay.

We’re still in the early stages of the brand publishing movement, and performance pay is definitely an issue to keep an eye on.

Image courtesy of jessamyn/flickr

It’s a simple trade — cash for audience and content — not too different from the ad-sale relationship publishers have had with brands for years.

If you think this is where the sponsored content phenomenon will end, then think again. The Huffington Post is taking sponsored content to the next level and beginning to break down the boundaries between brands and publishers.

As a site that publishes an article very 58 seconds, The Huffington Post has never been afraid of aggressive expansion. Now, they’re launching entirely new sections of the site that are sponsored by brands, like Cisco’s new Impact X section, “where people, technology and social converge.”

“We are empowering brands to take ownership of the real-time stories they want to tell.”

Impact X features stories about people who are using technology to make an impact for the greater good. Instead of creating original content for Cisco, HuffPo’s social marketing team curates new HuffPo articles about technology and social impact, placing them in the Impact X section.  This provides Cisco with a steady stream of original branded content, and gives the Huffington Post a way to monetize content the moment it’s published.

“We are empowering brands to take ownership of the real-time stories they want to tell by putting in place the right content strategy, by connecting it deeply to social to maximize earned media, and by strategically aligning content and paid advertising strategies,” HuffPo publisher Janet Balis told Digiday.

Balis packed an impressive amount of buzzwords into that quote (Real-time! Social! Earned media! Strategically aligning!), but HuffPo’s new sponsored content pages are definitely providing brands with a lot of value. If Cisco launched their own blog on tech’s social impact, they’d likely see a modest amount of readers at best. On HuffPo they’re going to reach many more eyeballs, thanks to HuffPo’s direct traffic, as well as the site’s strong search performance.

And once people land on HuffPo content, they share it — at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Scotsdale, Ariz., last week, Balis revealed that HuffPo sees 81 million social actions every month, and 800,000 Twitter referrals and 2 million Facebook referrals every day. During Impact X’s first 10 days up and running, it reached 10 million Twitter accounts and generated 20 million Twitter impressions, according to Digiday.

What makes HuffPo’s new strategy particularly interesting is the fact that brands sponsoring sections don’t need to fill it with just HuffPo content. Johnson & Johnson’s Global Motherhood page features original content created by Johnson & Johnson, as well as content curated by the HuffPo team. In a way, Johnson & Johnson is becoming a part of HuffPo’s editorial operation, publishing content on the HuffPo CMS.

In Impact X’s first 10 days, it reached 10 million Twitter accounts.

This presents an exciting new opportunity for brands that want to create their own original content but don’t want to go through the pains of building an audience. They can now drastically speed up the process by launching their own HuffPo section.

Though HuffPo’s the first, it likely won’t be the last publisher to experiment with taking sponsored content in this direction. Gawker Founder Nick Denton has indicated he imagines giving brands similar power through the new Kinja platform that’s being rolled out on Gawker sites Deadspin and Jalopnik. Expect sponsored content to head in intriguing and controversial new directions over the next few years, as the boundaries between publishers and brands to continue to blur.

Pheed, a Platform for Branded Content

Pheed, a new social platform on which users can share photo, video, audio, text, live broadcasts, and other various content, has garnered over one million users since it was introduced last August.

According to Digiday, brands have the capability to charge for content, and Pheed receives half of the profits.

Pepsi, Macy’s, and General Electric are already on the site, but have not yet begun to create their own content “pheeds.” Miley Cyrus had success on the site, when she posted some audio and 10,000 people logged onto the page in a mere 30 seconds to hear it. The article asks, will people pay for content from brands?

Gawker’s Branded Content Success

Felicia of NewsCred writes about Gawker and the success its had with its branded content.

There are eight people working in the brand content studio, which has been running since 2007. The blog “currently blends native and legacy advertising but is continuing to figure out how to bundle it best” and works with brands in the consumer electronics, travel, financial, and entertainment industries, to name a few.

Erin Pettigrew, director of business development at Gawker, said, “The publishers that are going to be most successful, are the ones that know how to tell stories. … Ultimately that’s what people want, they want to be entertained.”

Making Money in Freelancing

Forbes’ Susannah Breslin highlights ways that freelance writers can make money. 

When it comes to being a journalist, it can vary: “This is the life of the freelance journalist. One day you’re worth pennies. The next day you’re making several thousand dollars for a story you wrote in a few hours.”

Being a copywriter is very lucrative (she made $100 an hour), but soul-sucking, and as an editor, she made decent money and got to be around other writers. As a scriptwriter, her work never came out as she submitted it (but the money was good), and speaking gigs ended up being more work than she hoped for, with the traveling and preparation taking up time.

Freelancers and the Economy

The Atlantic describes the life of freelancers and how the number of independent workers has greatly increased since the economy’s downward spiral.

Highlighting The Freelancer’s Bible, the book written by Sara Horowitz, executive director of the Freelancers Union, Richard Greenwald writes, “Freelancers are nimble, technologically sophisticated and connected, they have formed hives or communities, but their have not yet found their political and collective voice.”

Australian Company Buys Freelancing Site

Freelancer.com, run out of Australia, has purchased vWorker, the fourth-largest marketplace for freelancers in the world, according to The Australian.

The company stated that it “now would have 6.6 million professionals, offering everything from website and software design and mobile device computing to writing, engineering, sales, translation and data entry.”

Oh, Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch, media mogul, has caused a stir on Twitter by posting a controversial statement this past weekend. According to the New York Times, he wrote, “Why is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?,” leading to charges of anti-semitism.

Critics also point out that coverage in his own newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and Times of London, could be skewed now because of the comment. He has since apologized, saying, “‘Jewish owned press’ have been sternly criticised, suggesting link to Jewish reporters. Don’t see this, but apologise unreservedly.”

Microsoft Trashes iPhone in New Video

Mashable reports that Microsoft has released a new video of representative of the company asking people to compare the new Nokia Lumia 920 to the iPhone.

The company has done the same thing in the past with its computers and Zume, comparing them favorably to Macs and iPods. In the video he “disses” Apple’s products and proclaims the Microsoft’s are better.

Travel Content for Los Angeles

DiscoverLosAngeles.com launched at the end of October, and it is a hub that includes “a growing list of travel search engines, destination ratings sites, and hotel booking platforms,” reports ClickZ.

The site is extremely social and digitally accessible: Visitors and residents can select regions to look at, use the experience builder “that allows users to add any activity to ‘My LA Bucket List’” and share, in real time, to Twitter and Facebook.

“Content on the site is also carefully edited to give the digital hub a voice and personality, unlike straightforward, information-based directories,” says ClickZ. In the future, it plans to provide insider tips from locals on topics such as culture, attractions, dining, and sports.

State Farm Provides Gawker’s Emergency Website

Last Monday, Gawker’s website went down due to Sandy, and State Farm came to the rescue, according to Mashable.

Todd Wasserman reports, “The insurer is running a banner on all of Gawker’s sites — including Gawker, Gizmodo and Jezebel — stating that the backup site is ‘covered by’ State Farm, alongside a phone number where readers can call to make a storm-related claim.”

The company is using the sponsorship as a way to promote its slogan, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” while trying not to use Sandy for marketing efforts, he writes.

Sandy’s Content Lessons

Newscred’s Felicia writes about what content creators could learn from Hurricane Sandy.

For example, since there were so many false reports and fake pictures being spread around, she argues that trust mattered: “Establishing yourself as a trusted source goes a long way toward encouraging loyalty among your site’s visitors.”

Images were also key factors in telling a good story, and people were focused on content that was hyper-local.

Keeping Up With Buyers’ Knowledge

Social Media Today’s Tony Zambito argues that these days, buyers are so knowledgeable that content marketers are struggling to keep up.

He claims that “buyers today are doubling their ability each year to determine if a piece of content will be useful or not” and that “once buyers make the discernment that content is useful, they begin to assimilate it into their environment and become content curators.”

He suggests that brands research to understand consumers, develop a content strategy, and sign on the right people to create the content.

While Reuters’ Net Income Rises, Profit Declines

According to the Wall Street Journal, Thomson Reuters’ operating income declined by 41 percent in the third quarter, while net income at the company increased by 24 percent.

Revenue fell by 7 percent, “as growth in the company’s legal and tax and accounting divisions couldn’t fully offset declines in its core businesses serving traders and investors as many of its largest global banking clients cut costs.”

Editor of Wired Quits 

Editor in chief of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, has resigned to “devote more time to the drone company he has been developing,” reports The New York Times.

He’s been at the company since 2001, and under his guidance, advertising dollars and circulation have grown, unlike most publications.
Researching for Content Marketing Campaigns

Beth Hayden of CopyBlogger says that in order to run a successful content marketing campaign, market research is key.

Research should be done that taps into the audiences wants and needs and helps “solve their problems and enable(s) them to live better, fuller, richer lives.” Marketers also need to be a part of the comments sections and integrate themselves within their audience, know what the audiences’ problems are, and make research part of the daily, weekly, or monthly routine.

Since market research is so difficult, she says, “It’s likely that our competitors aren’t doing it — or aren’t doing it well. And that gives us a spectacular advantage on the competition field.”

Of course, an article that discusses issues such as race or feminism will attract comments on either extreme, but sometimes a story about baking pie manages to build a heated discussion, too.

Sites with most comment success are often personal blogs where the author reads and responds to nearly every comment. Self-serving spam is deleted and incentivized against, and critical remarks are often constructive since the commenter knows the original author is listening.

Not every website has the manpower to invest time and effort in comment threads, leading to the abandoned garden effect, where, once published, and article is left to become adulterated by mindless and sometimes heartless commentary.

It’s left some publishers wondering if the Internet is better off without comments. Perhaps it is true that less than one percent of an audience scrolls down to read the them, and including a comment section is dead weight on a site, or worse, brings an unnecessary cost of moderation. (For example, The Huffington Post reports a grand total of  7 million comments per month, and in the past has advertised job postings for around-the-clock comment moderators.)

Another way to comment: Directed questions

This site, The Content Strategist, opts to end each post with a survey, called Urtak, rather than open-ended comments. The yes or no questions allow for reader feedback that is quantifiable and are generally less attractive to comment trolls. For readers, it offers a way to engage without much friction — it gives users something to click on — which is, after all, a key feature that separates the web from print.

Some blogging sites have launched without the option of comments. Svbtle is an invite-only blogging site that offers a “kudos” button in the top right corner of the post to bring in reader feedback. Medium (example page) could be called a blogging platform, but is ordered by topic rather than author, so it’s almost a group journal. Readers are given one option on which to click, similar to Svbtle’s, this time just called “Good Story.”

The community that content develops around itself might be driven by design decisions as much as editorial — note that YouTube, renown for particularly strongly worded comments, allows a thumbs up and a thumbs down, while Facebook only allows positive feedback — the Like.

A more established, but still interesting design standard is on Reddit, where a vote up or down is just an arrow and is therefore less driven by sentiment and more by perceived quality.

Brad Gerick, social media editor at Patch, recommends this voting strategy as a way to get the smarter comments up higher, calling it “a combination of Reddit and the good side of Gawker.”

Gawker’s comment aggressive approach

On Gawker, an algorithm surfaces the better comments to the top, while each user is responsible for moderating comments on the thread they’ve started. This solves the abandoned garden problem and treats comments as a true web product rather than a plugin that’s sort of tacked on to the end of a post.

But, it gets better — could comments sell? Traditional wisdom says that the uninformed riffraff will devalue content overall, and make advertisers less likely to want their brand next to it. But Gawker’s Nick Denton suggests comments offer a business opportunity.

In a staff memo: “We all know the conventional wisdom: the days of the banner advertisement are numbered. In two years, our primary offering to marketers will be our discussion platform.”

The idea is that a brand could post a comment for free just as easily as a brand can tweet — and pay for guaranteed exposure similar to how promoted tweets work.

But, the value is not the impressions — it’s the real time conversation that’s expected in comment threads. If discussions are heated, a brand could step in and address concerns. Then, publishers gain yet another party, who has an incentive for positive and enlightening conversation, to tend the comment garden.

Paranormal Activity’s Marketing a Screaming Success

The Paranormal Activity franchise’s social media campaign over the past five years has been a total success story.

Without fans petitioning online, the horror indie would have never made it to theaters outside major metropolitan areas.

Now Paranormal 4 is about to hit theaters, and Paramount is asking fans to “want it” on Facebook for the chance to have the movie premiere in their hometown.

So Much Data, So Little Time

In this sponsored content piece on TheAtlantic.com, IBM’s vice president of corporate marketing shares his thoughts on how marketing executives can use social media to their advantage, the changing role of the CMO in big business, and why big data keeps him up at night.

What LinkedIn Is Doing Right

Forbes.com picked apart the company’s strategy and came up with seven secrets to its social media success.

“It has put together a playbook that harnesses the great strengths of social media in ways that translate into unusually reliable profit growth,” George Anders said.

Why Marketers Need to Think Small

Marketing businesses may want to look to niche social communities for business solutions.

“The membership in highly focused professional communities like Spiceworks and FohBoh.com attract B2B companies, which know that success is more about quality than quantity,” Mashable’s Paul Gillan said.

Social Media Is Not a Mirror But a Lens

TechCrunch’s Gregory Ferenstein reports on how social media can be misleading. 

“Had I just gazed the world through my Twitter feed, I would think Chick-fil-A was on the verge of bankruptcy,” he said, “and also that Ron Paul was president, gay marriage was legal, and President Obama didn’t have a decent chance of losing the election

Apple Almost Ditched iPhone?

Talk about near misses.

Where and what would the iPhone be without its touch screen?

“According to Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of design, the iPhone was almost scrapped completely because of its touchscreen — now a major selling point,” The New Statesman reports.

Gawker Co-Founder Launching Content-Commerce Startup

New York Observer editor-in-chief and Gawker co-founder Elizabeth Spiers is leaving the Observer to start her own company.

Spiers didn’t give a great deal of detail about her new project, but she did tell Ad Age.com, ”The startup will focus on content and commerce in the health and wellness arena.” 

83 Million Facebook Accounts are Big Fakes

Miss Precious, the most pampered Pomeranian on earth, might have to give up her Facebook page, with the company cracking down on duplicate and false accounts.

“On Facebook we have a really large commitment in general to finding and disabling false accounts,” Facebook’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan said via CNN. “Our entire platform is based on people using their real identities.”

Gawker Media is one of the most successful blogging outlets on the Internet. In February of this year, one year after the site’s infamous redesign, owner Nick Denton reported readership had increased by 10 million monthly visitors over the year before.

By late spring of 2012, Gawker had reached, on average, 19 million viewers every month, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, and it’s one of the top 10 blogs on the web, according to Technorati.

Provide a mix of original and trending content

Gawker posts about what’s hot on Tumblr, Reddit, various blogs, and in traditional media, such as the New York Times. But it has also shifted to posting more original news stories and scoops.

“Gawker blogs once consisted almost entirely of remixes of other organizations’ news — with an added dash of commentary or knee-jerk snark,” wrote Denton on the site’s LifeHacker blog in November 2010. “One law of media competition applies as strongly to web properties as it did to their predecessors: Scoops drive audience growth.”

Denton continued, “We learned our lesson: Aggressive news-mongering trumps satirical blogging.”

The Gawker founder admits that his site sometimes pursues “gutter journalism,” such as revealing pictures of a young Christine O’Donnell partying, but such posts drive up numbers.

Denton says his priority is real news: “We believe that the best Web content optimization strategy is something as old as journalism itself: the shocking truth and the authentic opinion.”

Branded blogs can follow these same guidelines. While keeping their finger on the latest trending stories, they should also seek out their own scoops. Gawker maintains a mix of both.

Promote user discussion via comment sections

Gawker’s comments section is a prominent part of their website. The comments that pass the standards test show up on the articles, and users can engage in active discussion, sometimes creating dozens of different threads.

The section, adopted in part by the New York Times, allows users to reply to one another, post favorite comments to Facebook and Twitter, and builds a trusting relationship with the best commenters, so they don’t have to be vetted before posting.

New York Magazine quoted Denton in 2007 saying, “Gawker comments, long an embarrassment, frankly, now represent one of the strongest aspects of the site. … They reintroduce an element of anarchy, which was in danger of otherwise being lost, as the site became more professional. I want secrets to be exposed, memos leaked, spy photos published, arguments to fly.”

Along with encouraging commenters to join in the discussion of a news item, Gawker’s emphasis on comments can help the site track the popularity of posts. By creating a hierarchy within the section, novice users will be inclined to work harder to get more recognition, while the experts with the highest ratings will feel empowered.

By emphasizing the importance of comments, branded blogs can embolden readers and keep them coming back.

Using performance-based payment for writers

Paying writers in part or fully based upon how many hits their articles receive is a controversial tactic used by Denton. However, this is commonplace among blogs. While Denton argues that Gawker writers are encouraged to write original content and “linkworthy” posts, Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 says that there is a potential downside. 

Sure, he says, writers may strive for the most interesting posts and investigate scoops, but most will probably just link to whatever is most popular on Reddit, Pinterest, or Twitter to drive the numbers up. Karp argues this will lead writers to fixate on SEO, using certain keywords and tags in their posts to rank high on search engines.

Gawker stands out among its competitors in many ways: It gets “sensational” scoops that do well with its audience, it encourages commenters and discussion, and forces writers to take SEO and analytics into consideration.

Denton has provoked more than his fair share of backlash, but he’s created one of the most frequented sites on the Internet, one which offers telling lessons for any prospective web entrepreneur or brand blogger.

The site unveiled a new commenting system last week in hopes of promoting more insightful discussions on its posts.

The changes, which debuted April 26, use a combination of editor judgement and algorithms to determine which comments are worthy of keeping and which ones are boring and not contributing to thoughtful conversations.

Gawker’s new system, called Pow-Wow, will involve “fractional commenting,” in which the commenters who start the dialogues control them, and the algorithm would “punish boring commenters,” according to Urtak Blog‘s Marc Lizoain.

“Each comment and thread would be evaluated by machine and by human,” he said, “and unless the commenter is generating audience response, or has been explicitly approved by the author of the post, they could find themselves locked out of the discussion, while certain valued contributors, invited in advance, could be given priority.”

Nick Denton, owner of Gawker, said that online discussions tend to degenerate into breeding grounds for the lowest common denominator rather than becoming places where people can engage in interesting conversation about articles. He said that Pow-Wow will sort out the junk, and people will be rewarded for weighing in with meaningful comments.

In addition to fractional commenting and the algorithm, users can create “burner accounts” to post under anonymous names.

On the day Gawker revealed the change, the site had already collected “1 million comments on 7,500 posts from 130,000 active commenters” during the month of April, according to Nieman Journalism Lab.

Despite those numbers, Lizoain pointed out, “People simply don’t like to and don’t want to leave comments on content. Far fewer than 1% of any given web audience will take the trouble to leave their opinions in this form.”

He also said that Denton’s approach is contradictory: He hopes that high-profile celebrities will use the comments section, but he also allowing anonymity.

Time will tell whether Gawker’s new approach will yield the desired results. What do you think? Do people really care about commenting on blog posts?

Image courtesy of erjkprunczyk/flickr

A good site redesign follows business objectives while creating an aesthetically pleasing experience for readers. The best site redesigns challenge the status quo in editorial while considering the needs of the readers, and how they discover and consume information.  Gawker, Mashable, and Vogue all had site redesigns that made an impact on their business and showcased their innovation.

1. Gawker Redesign – February 2011

Objective: Increase Page Views

Gossip blog Gawker redesigned its site earlier this year to encourage more click-throughs, leading to more page views and eventually more advertising dollars. Founder Nick Denton observed how sites like TMZ were known for getting the latest scoop and wanted to create the same phenomenon for Gawker.  However, while the traditional reverse-chronological blog format showed the latest story, it did not allow for the best story of the day to be featured.

The "New" Gawker Layout

The current design allows feature stories to have real estate via a splash story template instead of being pushed down by more recent stories. When a person links to the post, they receive not just a single story but a supplementary index of other recent items. Since the web is becoming a more visual medium, each story now has a large visual such as a video or photo to accompany it.

2. Mashable Redesign – December 2010

Objective: Focus on Content

When you are a leading editorial publisher with audiences worldwide, your best product is your content and the columnists who write it.  Mashable’s previous design was cluttered and difficult to navigate through. The current design features an adjusted header with navigation to specific topics, organizes content into categories, and brings attention to a trending story before showing the most recent.  Offering more categories expanded the blog’s audience and better targeted current readers.

The "New" Mashable

Columnists are highlighted via a new sidebar feature with recent stories they have written.  For each post, the author’s image is posted below the preview along with a time stamp of how recently the article was written. The design includes more white space, providing a cleaner reader-friendly design. Mashable could not call itself the leading social and tech blog if sharing wasn’t encouraged. Readers can log in and “share through Mashable” or through any of their preferred social networks.

3. Vogue Redesign – September 2010

Objective: Bring Brand Values to Digital Realm

In 2010, Vogue found itself with an audience that was becoming more engaged in digital. Vogue catered to that audience and revamped its website to show its authority on fashion and its focus on style online.  Since Vogue’s print magazine is known for its impeccable aesthetic appeal, the same had to apply to its site. The colors and typefaces are dramatic, images are huge and social sharing is encouraged along with opportunities to interact with the content. An interesting feature are “lightboxes” which readers utilize as their own bookmarking tool or lookbook, making the browsing experience more interactive.

The "New" Vogue Digital

The magazine or “editorial” layout lends itself very well to a site that is essentially a digital version of Vogue magazine itself. The site offers a multimedia experience with full-screen slideshows and videos. There is currently a full-screen slideshow featuring the Vogue Archives with 125 years’ worth of covers readers can browse through. Vogue’s site design enhances the overall editorial experience, where both site and print publication can support one another.

Every time a new website design is introduced, there is always reader backlash since it momentarily disrupts their browsing routine. With innovation comes resistance, since people enjoy what’s familiar. However, companies like Gawker Media, Conde Nast (which owns Vogue), and Mashable are known for challenging the status quo, which has been key to keeping their blogs at the forefront of digital media.

Related articles

• Build a Gorgeous Blog without a Design Degree (contently.com)
• 7 Factors to Consider When Redesigning Your Website (mashable.com)
• How To Make Your Blog Posts As Shareable As Mashable’s (contently.com)
• 10 Tools For Converting Your Blog’s New Visitors Into Fans (contently.com)