WordblogJournalism in a changing world

Richard Sambrook tells us that four weeks after experimentally putting up the post heading “Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt Exclusive!” it has not significantly boosted the hits on his SacredFacts blog.

He says: “Perhaps I should be heartened by the quality of my regular readers.”

I tried a similar experiment, putting “sex” in a headline. That too failed to bring in more readers. But words and phrases like “citizen journalism”, “religion” and “blog” seem to boost visits.

But the longest, thickest tail belongs to “Among the dinosaurs and evolvers of journalism“. It was posted back in early August and this month is still at number five in the list of most visited pages.

I really don’t know what heads are going to work best but I suspect that the rules people give for news sites don’t necessarily apply to blogs.