Repairing the Web’s broken meter

There is no bigger issue facing the news business today than how to make the Web pay. And there is no bigger obstacle to solving that problem than figuring out how many people are visiting, how long they’re sticking around and the like.

As I found out last year when I was reporting a story on young news consumers for CommonWealth Magazine, the internal numbers compiled by Web sites like Boston.com and BostonHerald.com can be as much as three times higher than the numbers reported by Nielsen/NetRatings, the source of the leading apples-to-apples statistics used by advertisers.

The dilemma: Nielsen says it’s more accurate to ask people which sites they’ve visited than to look at a given site’s statistics, because an enormous percentage of those statistics are based on automated hits from search engines. News-business folks respond that Nielsen greatly undercounts the number of people who log on from work and from overseas.

Now, according to this article by David Cohn in the Columbia Journalism Review, help may be on the way. The Media Rating Council, a nonprofit group that helped standardize television and radio ratings nearly 50 years ago, has turned its attention to the Internet in an attempt to figure out all the metrics that should be of value to advertisers: how many people, how many different people, how many pages they’re calling up and how much time they’re spending with a given site.

These problems are far more difficult to solve than you might imagine. As Cohn points out, increasing numbers of privacy-minded people are setting their browsers to eliminate cookies every time they quit. The result: they’ll be counted as “unique users,” rather than return users, whenever they visit a particular Web site.

And if someone leaves a Web page on her screen while she goes on a 10-mile bike ride, how is that supposed to be measured?

The news business thrived on the lack of knowledge over whether any given subscriber would pore through the paper that day or toss it in the recycling bin unopened. Online, advertisers demand to know a lot more than that. So far, it’s proved impossible to answer their questions. Maybe that will change soon.

The Bailey Cosmo-logy

Cosmo Macero Jr., the only journalist I’m aware of who managed to compete with Steve Bailey and not look completely foolish, blogs a tribute to the now-former Globe columnist for Boston Magazine.

Macero, who left the Herald a few years ago and is now a vice president at O’Neill and Associates, also happens to be one of a handful of plausible replacements for Bailey. So what about it?

More on WBZ

How big a story is the downsizing at WBZ-TV (Channels 4 and 38)? Bigger than the Globe plays it — a small story inside City & Region. [Correction: I’ve been told that it made the front of City & Region in some editions.] But not as big as the Herald seems to think, with a huge front-page package.

With three well-known names — sports anchor Bob Lobel, entertainment reporter Joyce Kulhawik and on-air news guy Scott Wahle — departing the station, the local-newscast glory days of the 1970s and ’80s are starting to look more and more like the distant past.

Oddly, though, it may be the most retro of the three, Lobel, who still has a future in local television. As Herald columnist Steve Buckley points out, the newscasts have shrunk their sports segments in recent years because the obsessives have left for NESN, ESPN and the like.

If Lobel wants to keep working and doesn’t mind taking a substantial pay cut, he could presumably slide into a prime slot on cable tomorrow. Except when the Red Sox are playing, NESN still resembles a local-access outfit more than it does a professional operation. I like Bob Ryan’s show, but Lobel would really help.

By the way — think Dan Rea has had any second thoughts about moving from television to radio? No, I don’t think so, either.

Finally, the Outraged Liberal has some worthwhile observations on the WBZ cuts and related media matters.

The bell tolls for WBZ

If any broadcast news operation could avoid cuts, you’d like to think it would be WBZ. With two television stations (Channels 4 and 38), a powerhouse news-and-talk (AM 1030) radio station and an unusually good, video-laden Web site, the CBS-owned operation should have been in a strong position.

Unfortunately, 30 people are being let go, according to this Jessica Heslam piece in the Boston Herald. According to a story by Bill Carter in the New York Times, CBS is cutting back nationally, and Boston is being hit harder than just about anywhere.

Another slap for Judge Murphy

This has become the story that won’t die, and I’m sick of it. So take it away, Jessica Van Sack:

The Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy be publicly censured, suspended without pay for 30 days and fined $25,000 for sending two “bizarre” and “threatening” letters to the publisher of the Boston Herald.

Globe story here.

A free Herald?

The plunge in Metro Boston’s circulation remains a mystery, with the biggest mystery being whether there really was a plunge or just a change in accounting. (Like, the auditors discovered 50,000 copies in a Dumpster somewhere?)

Boston Herald editor Kevin Convey suggests a new slogan to Boston Magazine’s Amy Derjue: “Metro: We Can’t Even Give It Away.” More substantively, Convey says, “If economics were ever to permit us to go free we would give away one hell of a lot more papers than the Metro has managed to do during its lifetime.” (Via Adam Reilly.)

Maybe, maybe not. It all comes down to those economics. If I could choose between a free Herald as it is today and a free Metro, there’d be no contest — I’d grab a Herald every time. Trouble is, it’s highly unlikely that you could turn the Herald into a free paper without laying off most of the staff, cutting way back on pages and — yes — turning it into something very much like Metro. Or BostonNOW.

Unless — and here’s the big unless — the Herald could find a way to make the Web pay, and then publish a small, free paper as a supplement to the online edition. But we’re probably a long way from that becoming realistic.