WSJ will miss the scoops from Mossberg, Swisher

David Holmes of Pando Daily has some interesting data that shows why The Wall Street Journal will miss tech journalists Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher, who ran All Things Digital but are leaving the company at the end of the year.

Holmes writes, “What about overall brand strength? How many eyeballs and clicks will News Corp. lose when the ATD staff rides off into the sunset? These charts from content intelligence company Kontera, which measures what consumers are reading and hearing on social media sites and blogs, reveal just how important Mossberg, Swisher, and Kafka were to the Wall Street Journal.

Thanks to its reporters’ cozy relationship with Apple executives, AllThingsD was an Apple scoop machine, and these reporting coups netted real traffic for News Corp. Around August 10, 2013, when AllThingsD broke the news about the iPhone 5S launch, the site held a share of up to 64 percent of AllThingsD and Wall Street Journal’s combined telecommunications coverage.

line-charts-telecomm

AllThingsD also netted big traffic on entertainment scoops. The week of July 15, when Peter Kafka broke the news about Hulu’s plans to compete with Netflix, AllThingsD share of entertainment consumption topped 77 percent.

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.