Blogging at The Standard since Election 2014

Written By: - Date published: 8:30 am, April 23rd, 2015 - 10 comments
Categories: The Standard - Tags: , , , , , , ,

Lprent occasionally posts about some of The Standard’s technical stats, like increased pageviews and commenting milestones. I love that kind of crunchy information, even if sometimes I have to read it a few times to pick up the detail …

Anyway, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at the activity of our authors last six months (October to March, since April hasn’t finished yet) on The Standard since the general election. I was quite surprised myself!

On average, 162 posts were published every month since October, with only a small dip from December to February when we were all meant to be on holiday.

Taking out the updates posted under Notices and Features, which includes the daily Open Mike and Weekly Social posts, the average was 73 posts per month, and they were written by 10 to 16 individual authors, not including guest posts – there’s usually two or three of those each month, although they spiked to eight in October due to the interest in the Labour leadership election.

The top three most prolific authors each month always include Anthony Robins and mickysavage (Anthony usually has a slight edge!) plus one other in third – lprent, Mike Smith, Tracey or myself.

There are authors who post heaps – like those mentioned above – and authors who drop in and out as the mood or the issues take them. Seventeen authors active from October to March averaged three or fewer posts per month.

A bigger piece of work – which I’ll probably sink some energy into because I’m a bit of a nerd like that – would be to look at how the author roster has changed over the years – kind of like the way Wikipedia shows changes in band lineups over time.

The upshot, I guess, is that the old rightwing catch-cry – that The Standard doesn’t represent a diverse set of opinions – is rubbish. You can’t get this many lefties in one spot and expect us to all sing the same tune, and that’s before we open it up to comments!

That being said, we could probably do better on representing a diversity of names – 20% of our authors over the past six months have names beginning with B. An imaginary chocolate fish goes to whoever can name them all in the comments.

10 comments on “Blogging at The Standard since Election 2014 ”

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  1. Lanthanide 1
    23 April 2015 at 9:35 am

    I think the most interesting recent change in authorship is Carol vanishing, since she was always a very consistent commenter and from memory seemed to post at least 2-3 articles per week.

  2. weka 2
    23 April 2015 at 5:18 pm

    Bill, Blip, Bunji, Bryan Gould…

  3. Reddelusion 3
    24 April 2015 at 12:58 am

    get over carol, she’s gone, plenty of crazies to take her place