Bin Laden Coverage: Nuggets, Segments, Jokes
Now that we have feasted on healthy portions of Osama Bin Laden news for more than a week. What did we learn about coverage of a worldwide event like that? Two compelling columns point to a strategy and a trend of how our appetite for the various flavors of news can be measured.
First is Danny Sullivan’s insightful piece that touched on the “nuggeting of news” and how blogs and some mainstream media pursued the story in bite-size pieces and were rewarded by Google with more frequent and higher SERP positions. Is it an overt chase for pageviews? Absolutely. Is it a devious new blogger tactic? Hardly, it’s been a media mainstay since the telegraph.
“It was effectively doing what news organizations and wire services have long done, a “write though,” constant updates to a story. Chasing pageviews too? Maybe. But also part of what is native to some news organizations.”
– Danny Sullivan
The second piece, the Pew Research Center's analysis of Bin Laden coverage, was even more interesting and referred to a study that focused on which story angles garnered the most coverage and where those angles were more prevalent. What was the No. 1 theme on Twitter, Facebook? Humor, followed closely by conspiracy theories and hoaxes.
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