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Inside Forbes: The Inspiring Data Behind Two Digital Reporting Strategies

This article is more than 10 years old.

What works best on the Web, short or long-form journalism? The monthly audience statistics for two accomplished FORBES reporters prove that online news consumers crave both. They devour brief and timely information and seek out the in-depth coverage that news stalwarts feared would disappear in the digital age.

Eric Savitz, our highly respected Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, and Matt Herper, one of the nation's top pharmaceutical writers, are among the many talented staff writers and knowledgeable contributors who are building audiences around their expertise and individual brands on Forbes.com.

Eric is admiringly referred to within FORBES as the "Human Newswire." He's up at 5 am Pacific time, writes 10 posts a day (with market-timed bursts at 6:30 am and 1 pm) and is often spotted posting into the wee hours of the next morning Eastern time. "It's a good approach for a workaholic," he says. Eric zeroes in on the intersection of technology and investing, focusing on the public markets. "My approach reflects the nature of the trading day. I keep my posts short and punchy, and where I can I try to provide a perspective on why things matter in a historical context." Eric squeezes in more expansive digital and magazine reporting when he's not focused on his other responsibilities, which include running our largest bureau and finding the very best contributors to write about technology on Forbes.com.

Now for a peek at Eric's stats. Since arriving at FORBES just about a year ago, he's written more than 2,000 posts. He has 6,500 Twitter followers, 1,400 Facebook friends and about 1,000 connections on LinkedIn. Eric is also closing in on 600 followers on Forbes.com. Eric lives off traffic from social sites, Google and Yahoo -- and the SEO, SMO and product work we've done to help him leverage those audiences.

The frequency and timeliness of his posts are attracting the news-seeking audience in greater numbers. "When chip companies issue earnings warnings, that has resonance for PC makers, and therefore matters to retailers," he says. Eric was also ahead of the reporting pack in covering the floods in Thailand. "It was clear to me early on those events would have wide-ranging effects on companies with no direct exposure to the flood waters."

As the green line in the chart above shows, the average number of his popular stories (more than 10,000 page views) has doubled in the second half of 2011, driving his monthly unique visitors sharply higher (the blue bars). His output has remained steady, 1,000 posts in the first half of the year and the same in the second half. By continually covering many of the same companies, he's building a loyal base of followers (100,000) who visit his page more than once a month. That last statistic is particularly meaningful for our incentive-based, non-staff digital contributors. The bigger their repeat, or loyal audience (as opposed to once-a-month visitors), the bigger their monthly compensation.

So, let's get to Mr. Herper, a walking, talking, posting encyclopedia of nearly everything that has to do with medicine. Matt now posts far less frequently than Eric, but in much more depth. He has a strong following, too. He has 10,000 Twitter followers, 560 Facebook friends, 700 LinkedIn connections and 370 followers on Forbes.com.

Take a look at his numbers in the chart to the right. Matt started out posting quite a bit (the green line), but reduced his output as he discovered the long-form rhythm worked best for the topic, his audience and his traffic numbers. "I think it's partly because, in medicine, a lot of the challenge isn't just pointing out what is important, but also why," Matt says. "For a piece to be really valuable, you may need to take the reader into another world." As you can see, his audience is trending up even as his output dramatically slows down.

Matt works his audience. "I promote pretty heavily on Twitter, where I try to stay very engaged. I think about Yahoo Finance, and I'm starting to think a lot about LinkedIn, where the point seems to be to get passed around among a group of extremely well-informed, professional readers, which then leads to even more well-informed, professional readers finding my work." He also engages with them. Using our comment moderation and filtering tools, you can always find Matt mixing it up with audience members who join the conversation.

Matt's also able to rely on outside experts to cover breaking medical news for us. He's brought on 10 or so knowledgeable writers who are part of our 850-strong contributor base (Eric, with his Technology team, has added even more than that). With Matt's "orbit" of talent, he has more freedom to focus on longer stories. As he says, "I don't need to worry about what might have been missed."

That November traffic spike in the chart above is particularly telling -- and certainly caught my attention. It's the result of a one-two punch from Matt. First came his FORBES cover story on Bill Gates and his efforts to deliver vaccines to the most needy children. In the chart to the left, you'll see that post did well when first published on Forbes.com on Nov. 3, generating 50,000 page views. By mid November, readership dropped to a trickle. Then all of a sudden, it came back to life, in part because of social media. Since late November Matt's cover story has been producing 10,000 page views a day. It now has 315,000 total page views, with more than half the traffic coming since Nov. 23, weeks after it was first published online.

And that's not all. As Matt's initial cover traffic began to wane, he did something very shrewd. He published a lengthy related post on Forbes.com from material that never made it into the magazine cover package -- the stuff that fell on the cutting-room floor. That post has so far resulted in 150,000 page views. With our "Vest Pocket" publishing tool, Matt also used those pages to promote his original cover story and the Herper brand. So, when you add it all up, the Bill Gates content helped Matt gain nearly 500,000 page views to date -- and no doubt more followers across the Web and Forbes.com. We hope to duplicate this magazine-to-Web success as we extend our incentive-based digital contributor plan to print in the new year (more on that in future posts).

When I first transitioned to the digital world more than a decade ago, my traditional media colleagues ribbed me for abandoning "real" reporting in favor of the fast and the short. No one reads in-depth stories online, they said. Then, a few years ago, I started a new kind of digital news company that in their minds put me forever on the dark side of journalism (never mind that our top contributor consistently wrote 2,000-word posts). Perhaps audiences back then did gravitate to shorter fare. Today, they want it all. As we build out our strategy and The New Newsroom at FORBES,veteran journalists like Eric and Matt -- and the digital-savvy reporters of a new generation -- are using our highly customized publishing, commenting and data tools to find and serve audiences. It's all good for journalism -- and for building the new media experiences required by today's audiences.