Arthur Sulzberger Jr. note: Zennie62 gains 300,000 visitors in one day

Over the years, the New York Times' Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has openly complained about Google's influence on media rather than do much to use the Google search system to the New York Times' advantage.

While giving the keynote speech at the 2008 Webby Awards and while talking about the Internet, Sulzberger said "Google has become a vast content distribution system; a massive editorial filter", but did not explain how the NY times was working with Google. And while his view of Google has transformed from competitor, to potential buyer, to partner, only within the last week has Sulzberger said the media must work with Google.

The same isn't true for News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch, who once threatened to pull all of his publications from Google, a move that would have the same impact on Google as a gnat bitting an elephant.

And when they've not complained, they've issued insults at Google employees. Take Robert Thompson saying that Google's Marrisa Mayer "unintentionally encourages promiscuity" at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last year (in this video at the 7:20 mark):



Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Rupert Murdoch (as well as Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington, John Battelle of Federated Media, members of AdAge.com, Robert Thomson of The Wall Street Journal, and media companies like Starcom and PR companies like Spark) take note: Zennie62 gained almost 300,000 visitors in one day on SFGate.com on Thursday, March 18th. It happened with just seven blog posts and while this blogger who did it will not go into the specific technics of what is a systems approach to blogging, it did work and it's worked before.

Zennie62 - eh, this blogger - has drawn over 1 million visitors to SFGate.com each month since November of 2009. That's a five month unbroken string, with the best month to date being December, with over 2 million visitors. And the systems approach to blogging was developed and used all during that time.

Many publishers do not have a systems approach to the production of media content. It's more than just a trend page or a traffic report, and its a massive sensitivity to time. But beyond that, what I've learned is the window of life for news, what used to be called the 24-hour cycle, has now shrank to just 20 minutes.

On the average, it takes a hot news item 20 minutes to remain at the top most place on any real time search tracking system before it drops to number two place, or some where below number one. Rare is the story that takes the number one position and sits there. Tiger Woods was the one story that did, The Haiti Earthquake story, and the Sandra Bullock story did for all of one day.

And even when stories take that position, many publishers don't know what to do. They use old media approaches to deal with the top story, get their one article out, and that's it. And many don't know how to blog or understand the difference between blogging and journalism. Sorry to say, but what is learned in journalism school is totally antithetical to the demands of the 21st Century media market. The J-school must be restructured to address the new industry.

To close, Arthur Sulzberger Jr and Rupert Murdock should stop complaining about Google and be smart enough to work within Google. If Google's used correctly, it can be your friend.