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The Christian Science Monitor > The Wall Street Journal

Many newspapers have begun locking their content behind paid firewalls; unless you register and pay, you can’t read their stories. The logic is that they can’t afford to give the news away for free anymore, because their advertising is getting decimated. (Craigslist is utterly destroying the traditional classified-ad market, and classifieds are the most profitable ads in any paper.)

But what happens to a paper’s readership and influence when it puts up the gates in cyberspace? Bloggers don’t link to it, which means it vanishes from Google and spirals into a cycle that eventually erases it from the mindspace of the Internet. The Wall Street Journal has a print circulation of 2,106,774, making it the second-biggest paper in the country, but you’ll almost never find a link to a Journal article in a Google search — because the content is inaccessible and thus never linked to.

In contrast, consider the Christian Science Monitor. Its print circulation is a measly 71,000, ranking it 242nd in size, way behind the Journal. Yet it has 1.7 million unique visitors per month to its web site, because the content is free — and good — and thus bloggers link to it promiscuously. Media pundits often note that more people read the New York Times online than in print, but the Monitor is an even more extreme example of the trend: Its online audience, and thus its online influence, is more than ten times larger than its print one.

Now Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman has pioneered a brilliant way to rank papers, based on a super-cool ratio: How many blog-links point to a paper, per thousand copies of print circulation. The short form is “LpkC”; you could also think of it, Zuckerman adds, as a measure of a paper’s “blogginess.” The bigger your LpkC number, the more disproportionately huge is your online influence.

He crunched the numbers on the 20 US papers with the biggest circulation, and added in the 30th, 40th, and 50th, etc., up to the 150th, to get a wide sense of the field. He also threw in the Christian Science Monitor, even though it’s way smaller than the smallest on that list. According to his calculations, here are the top papers, ranked by LpcK number:

Christian Science Monitor - 134.90

New York Times - 63.08

Washington Post - 58.44

San Francisco Chronicle - 38.32

Boston Globe - 29.80

Seattle Post Intelligencer - 18.56

New York Post - 12.48

LA Times - 11.21

Check it out: The tiny Monitor more than doubles the number for the monolithic Times. Interestingly, the mean LpkC for all papers Zuckerman studied was 14.43. When he calculated the papers with the lowest LpcKs, here’s what he got:

Charleston Post and Courier - 0.06

New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News - 0.22

Middletown (NY) Times Herald-Record - 0.39

The Wall Street Journal - 0.40

Fort Myers News Press - 0.50

I love it — the Journal’s rating is 337 times smaller than the Monitor’s! Of course, there’s no doubt that the Journal is still a much more influential paper, though given these numbers, I wouldn’t be surprised if its closed-down gamble eventually blows up in its face. If online advertising continues to grow, the Monitor could wind becoming unduly profitable for its size, while the Journal goes in precisely the opposite direction.

The ecology of influence is changing, and fast. Will the ecology of advertising change too?

(Thanks to Techdirt for this one!)


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I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
V. A. To me death seems to be an evil.
M. What, to those who are al­ready dead? or to those who must die?
A. To both.
M. It is a mis­ery, then, be­cause an evil?
A. Cer­tain­ly.
M. Then those who have al­ready died, and those who have still got to die, are both mis­er­able?
A. So it ap­pears to me.
M. Then all are mis­er­able?
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January 24, 2010 » 03:22 PM

One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

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January 15, 2010 » 01:36 PM

BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

January 14, 2010 » 10:04 PM

“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)

January 11, 2010 » 01:45 PM

I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.

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