Paladino received the most media attention for his anti-gay remarks, while Cuomo seemed to receive the most media attention around alleged claims of an affair.

We then looked at the volume of news being produced around each candidate. The graphs below display the number of headlines in the news that mention each candidates (measured from September 1 to October 13):

Paladino appears to be stirring the pot a bit more and besting Cuomo in news buzz the first half of October. Does anything surprise you? Do you think the news buzz gap will narrow the second half of October? Let us know in the comments!

Here are some of my take-aways from this graph, and two other comparison graphs you’ll enjoy:

1. Foursquare had way more media buzz over both time periods. Foursquare’s coverage is pretty consistent as well, seeing 47% of their headline mentions from June 1 to July 31 then 53% from Aug 1 to Sept 30.
2. Gowalla had more total headline mentions since June 1st, but SCVNGR had significantly more mentions from Aug 1 to Sept 30. This is most likely directly correlated to SCVNGR’s recent, and seemingly successful, PR push guided focused on increasing the service’s consumer adoption.

Another useful exercise is to compare which publications are covering Foursquare and SCVNGR.*

Not surprisingly, a large proportion of SCVNGR’s media coverage has come from Boston-area publications, like this blog, Mass High Tech and Xconomy. With this information, we think it is safe to assume that the buzz around SCVNGR is still a very local phenomenon, as their push to be a more mainstream consumer service is still in its infancy.

*Gowalla was left out because no one wants to read about the MySpace of location-based services.

After diving into our news index we found that taxes and the economy dominated headlines in September, followed by health. Mentions of ‘health’ were significantly more in number than mentions of the word ‘healthcare’, and after diving a bit deeper, we found stringed phrases like ‘health plan’ and ‘health insurance’ were used.

Collectively, mentions of war related nations or terminology accounted for half of the remainder of most mentioned issues in headlines. Other top issues mentioned included gay, jobs, government, oil, spending, budget and energy.

Of the top three pundits mentioned in August headlines (Beck, Bush and Palin), only Palin went on to continue to dominate the news in September. Clinton, O’Donnell and Palin were the three most popular names in the political sphere this September, with mentions of O’Donnell during primaries in the third week of September skyrocketing. At the end of September, O’Donnell still held media attention, with Whitman and Colbert gaining a solid share of the news, as well.

And as predicted, President Obama was mentioned most frequently in headlines in September (bottom graph).

Mentions of names in headlines from news outlets and blogs across the web:

Mentions of ‘Obama’ in headlines from news outlets and blogs across the web:

_____

Were you surprised at any of the pundits mentioned? What other political news trend data do you want to see?

It has been a tough year for The Boston Globe

Last week’s announcement (more here) by the Boston Globe that they’d be splitting their news content across two properties, one of which would require a paid subscription, drew oodles of attention from the media industry. Though it’s certainly not the only attempt to resurrect the slumping newspaper business, the Globe’s strategy charts an unknown course in the new media landscape.

The plan, slated for rollout in the “second half of 2011,” will effectively split the Globe into two online brands. The current online iteration, Boston.com, will remain online with a more limited content base, while a new site, BostonGlobe.com, will host all the content produced by the newspaper’s staff and require a subscription to access. Prices for the subscriptions have not yet been announced.

In light of yesterday’s Future of News event, hosted by our crew here at BostInnovation and Pinyadda and part of FutureM, here are three theoretical scenarios the future might hold for the Globe and its two-brand strategy:

1) Tempered Success

If things go as the Globe hopes, traffic to the Boston.com domain will remain relatively stable, leaving advertising revenues for that property intact. As the editorial focus shifts more toward local communities and breaking news, increasing numbers of people will feel connected to the site, increasing community engagement, opening up new opportunities for local advertising, and increasing the amount of time people spend on the site. On the flip side, a small but dedicated customer base who appreciates more in-depth analysis and investigative reporting will slowly start to pony up for BostonGlobe.com content, along with another minority that simply must have their favorite columnist or reporter. The key to the success of this approach, in my opinion, is the Globe’s ability to provide content and services that create very significant differentiation between the two products. If a subscription to BostonGlobe.com gave me a visually appealing, ad-free reading experience and free access to a great mobile and iPad application, I’d at least have something to think about.

2) Stabilization

In the second best scenario, the change causes Boston.com’s traffic and subsequently, its ad revenue, to decline. Parts of this revenue decline are made up for by a small influx of paid subscriptions to BostonGlobe.com. The paper experiments repeatedly with a different mix of content on both properties, trying to get the subscription revenue gains to exactly offset the ad revenue declines. The result is a stabilization of revenue, but a dampening of user experience on both properties as the paper keeps turning knobs and dials trying to balance the equation. The major question in this scenario is whether or not the increased cost and resources of running two different destinations will ultimately add to the burden or product enough revenue to lessen it.

3) Continued Decline

In the nightmare scenario for the Globe, traffic to Boston.com drops sharply and BostonGlobe.com’s potential subscribers, uncertain about the value of the new destination, trickle in slowly and defect over time. The increased overhead of managing two domains and still continuing the print edition leads to a widening revenue gap that places still more pressure on an already shorthanded newsroom. Mobile experiences become victims of cost-cutting measures and overall readership continues to trend downwards as upstarts like Patch and independent bloggers take local news market share. If the outcome of the planned split is two independently good products that people like, this scenario can be avoided. But if the split produces two mediocre properties in place of the current one, the results could be dire.

Certainly, there are innumerable scenarios that could play out, and the ones above are meant to illustrate some broad reactions that could affect the Globe’s future. No matter what happens, the Globe deserves credit for its willingness to step outside the box and try something new. The company’s decision in 1995 to brand the online version separately has come full circle in 2010, and only time will tell if the attempt is successful.

For more on the Globe’s impending split, check out these great links:

Double, double: More on the Boston Globe’s new Two-Site Strategy – Nieman Lab

Boston.com’s New Strategies: Retention and Switch – Newsonomics

Make Like Boston.com and Split – Columbia Journalism Review

The Globe Mates With Itself – Bostonist

Beard leaves, paywall goes up: R.I.P. Boston.com, 1995-2010? – Boston Phoenix

Publisher Chis Mayer on the Globe’s new pay model – Media Nation

What are your thoughts on the Globe’s new model? Genius innovation, moderate improvement, doomed to failure? Leave a comment and let us know!

Note: This article was originally published here by The Huffington Post. BostInnovation.com and The Huffington Post have a content partnership. Chase Garbarino, BostInnovation and Pinyadda founder & CEO, contributes to a weekly column on entrepreneurship for the Huffington Post.

On Christmas Day in 2005, during my junior year of college, my mother gave me a copy of the Small Business Opportunities magazine in my stocking. To this day, I can still remember the headline jumping out at me: “College Student Makes $300,000 In A Month.” After briefly skimming the article about the student setting up an affiliate shopping site, my mind was was made up – I was going to start an internet business.

The stack of resumes and cover letters prepped for internship opportunities at Lehman Brothers, Goldman and other financial companies never ended being mailed. Instead, a friend of mine and I created an internship position on several job recruiting sites calling for the nation’s top collegiate journalists and media makers to join “The New York Times of college publications.” That night, as I went to bed, it hit me like a ton of bricks: Did I seriously just bail out on applying for legitimate internships to start a national collegiate news site with absolutely no technical or media experience?

After several beers, a night of tossing and turning, and 24 hours of avoiding internet access, I finally checked my e-mail. We had received over 100 applications within a day and ended up receiving a total of over 300 by the time the listing expired after three days. The magazine headline that planted the seed for my interest in entrepreneurship quickly faded to the back of my mind. I was hell bent on giving students at the peak of their intellectual curiosity and development, a platform to share their new ideas and beliefs with the world, and CampusWord was born.

The next 18 months of my college career could be described as fearlessly trying to row the boat and plug the holes at the same time. I andCampusWord’s other co-founders, Greg Rogan and Kevin McCarthy, had little technical experience on our side, so running our website in the early days was always an adventure. With little to no money, we were forced to outsource our development efforts to countries like China, Vietnam and South America.

To give an example of what life in the tech fast-lane was like, at one point during the summer I was on my way to meet the parents of my then girlfriend for the first time. They knew little about me other than that I “ran a news website.” As I walked in the door ready to turn the charm on, the conversation quickly moved to CampusWord. I began giving my best speech about the importance of hosting an open platform for students across the country to share ideas and opinions. I was really on a roll. As we migrated over to their computer to view the site, I continued to ramble on as I typed in the domain. My gaze turned to the screen and rather than seeing a vibrant homepage of student contributed articles, there was simply a black screen with a picture of a masked man with a ticking time bomb and some questionable text in a different language. Needless to say my confident rambling quickly turned to broken and confused sentences as the grandmother’s face turned white. I assured them this wasn’t our site, I wasn’t a radical extremist of any sort and that we must have been hacked. Soon after, our hosting company confirmed a number of sites had been hacked and they corrected the problem. Regardless, the dinner conversation was stilted to say the least.

At its peak, CampusWord’s network included over 100 of the nation’s top collegiate journalists and media makers and drew an audience of over 100,000 unique visitors a month. Ultimately, though, CampusWord didn’t end up turning into a big, successful business and never made $300,000 in a month, as promised by the Christmas stocking magazine. This was mainly due to my lack of understanding of true marketing scale, and partly because of our team’s ideological desire to keep CampusWord in the hands of students — not to mention that we decided to pursue what we believed to be a bigger opportunity in creating a large-scale news aggregation technology that now powers our current properties, BostInnovation and Pinyadda. We are, however, proud of the fact that our staff of contributors from CampusWord have gone on to work for top media companies like Politico, CNN, Mashable, NY Daily News, TV Guide, The Onion and many others.

I consider an entrepreneur to be someone who creates something out of nothing. Good entrepreneurs create something of value out of nothing. While we certainly would have liked to have created more monetary value from CampusWord, we created value developing the foundation for our current business and in helping launch some very promising careers for others. When you see true value delivered to your users and customers from work your team has done with little to no resources, or your former employees enjoy success, there is no better feeling. And that is why I am an entrepreneur.

You can contact Chase at chase at pinyadda dot com

Yahoo!, the top content-producing site on the web, lead the way. Regional news outlets like Orange County Register and Miami Herald comprised half of the top twenty sites – most of which seem to be in the south and west part of the nation. As for other sites, Real Clear Politics covered the Tea Party most heavily. Newsmax, National Public Radio, the New York Times, Huffington Post and The Atlantic followed close behind.

Are you surprised regional news outlets are covering the Tea Party so heavily? What sites do you think should have made the top twenty?

Mentions of Republican or GOP led in headline mentions throughout September, trailing off at the end with Democrat or Dems mentions overtaking the last few days of the month. Mentions of Tea Party were prevalent in the press throughout September — passing mentions of Democrat or Dems in the third week of September — but also trailed off the end of the month. Mentions of Liberal and Conservative party stances were mentioned to much less of a degree than party names. Interestingly,

We also took a snapshot of total party mentions in the press in September:

The GOP clearly led in media buzz, and interestingly Tea Party mentions exceeded mentions of Republican.

Are you surprised at any of the data? What other political data are you interested in seeing? Email us or leave your thoughts in the comments!

Here’s a quick tour of the new features and a little description of each:

(Please note: A small fraction of the Pinyadda community is using Internet Explorer 7, and we are experiencing a few issues on this browser. Please bear with us as we work through these bugs.)

New Left Hand Navigation

This area is really the nerve center of your Pinyadda interface, and we wanted to add a hefty dose of customization as well as make this component easier for new users to navigate. We added drag-and-drop organization for sites and topics,a dead-simple folder structure to help you customize your news even more, and made sure that when you follow something new your navigation updates instantly. For those of you who’ve been concerned about leaving your RSS reader behind, this update should help ease the transition. Now you can keep your organizational standards and get all the great perks that come with a system that’s been built social from the ground up.

Notifications Functionality

We know that constant email updates can get annoying. But we also know that you like to be told when something cool happens, or if you’ve achieved a cool new reward. Our solution to this Catch-22 is the new notifications feature, which lets you know when good things happen without interrupting your experience on the site. Now, when you get a private message, unlock a reward, receive a recommendation or gain a new follower, you’ll get a notification that lets you easily view the update and take action. If you want to see all your notifications, just click on the link to at the bottom of the dropdown. And don’t forget to share!

Recommend Sites, People, and Topics

After seeing so many people evangelize their favorite sites on Pinyadda,  tell us about their go-to topic feeds and suggest users your friends should follow, we wanted to be sure to provide an easy way to recommend the stuff you’re into to your friends and colleagues. Now, all you need to do is go to an individual site or topic feed or someone’s profile, click the gears button at the top right, and click “Recommend.” You’ll be prompted to select whether you want to send a recommendation to all your followers, or just to individual people (you can even enter an email address of a user not on Pinyadda). They’ll receive your recommendation in their notification tab at the top.

Redesigned Search Feature

We all have a pretty good idea of how a search function is supposed to work, and we needed to make ours do what our users thought it would. You gave us a lot of feedback on this one and the result is a simplified search box, auto-suggest feature, and redesigned results page does a much better job of helping you quickly find what you’re looking for. Whether you’re searching for articles, people, sites, or topics, just type your query into the box and we’ll do our best to read your mind. If you don’t see what you’re looking for in the auto-suggest field, just hit the enter key and you’ll be given a full page of sortable results.

Updated Information Architecture

This is a fancy way of saying we moved a few menu options to a place where they make more sense. If you’re trying to add a link to Pinyadda or submit an RSS feed for your favorite blog, you can now find those options under the Newsstand dropdown. See what we did there? The newsstand is as much yours as it is ours, and we wanted to make sure we made that clear.

While we know change is sometimes hard to deal with, we hope you all like these updates. They’re drawn in large part from your fantastic feedback and we continue to be incredibly grateful to have a such an engaged, dedicated, and thoughtful community. And please, let us know what you think! There’s a whole lot more great stuff on the horizon and we’ll be sure to share more soon.

Love,

The Yadda Squad

Featured Panel Participants

Panel 1: Content-Side

Panel 2: Business-Side



As print media continues to decline and more consumers turn to digital technologies for their daily news, publishers are reinventing the way they create and distribute content. Pinyadda and the leading digital publishers, content creators and strategists above will discuss the evolving news landscape and future of this rapidly changing industry. Factors such as location, search, new media, and a socially enabled world will all be discussed.

Panel Details

The first panel will cover how the editorial process has changed around gathering news, creating community, and user-driven content creation and aggregation. Pinyadda and BostInnovation’s product lead, Austin Gardner-Smith, will moderate. Themes include: Changing distribution structures; New consumption platforms; Content and demand.

The second panel will discuss new business models for digital content and opportunities across platforms such as mobile and tablet. Pinyadda and BostInnovation’s Co-Founder and CEO, Chase Garbarino, will moderate. Themes include: Revenue glut; Paywalls and subscriptions; A way forward.

NOTE: This event is sold out. If you would like to attend, we have a limited number of reserved spaces. Please contact cheryl at pinyadda dot com.