farbster

Are people just going directly to their site? Or going to BA? Or right to FT? Or do you follow a BA blogger directly via twitter? How about RSS?

I find that I'm more and more just using twitter and then clicking if I'm interested.

TravelingPeanut

I like my news very fresh and bloggers don't often provide that. I have a crazy RSS set up and a few Twitter lists that I mainly read. If I think a specific blogger may have an interesting opinion or some insight to share about a certain development, I may drop by their blog.

kokonutz

I tend to get mine from the Face Book. That way I at least get a preview before I invest in a click. Although some have gotten annoyingly savvy about being just vague enough in the FB preview to require a click to see what the post is about.

But I have gotten savvy too, and have stopped clicking unless the headline is clear.

nsx

Blogs for the headline, then straight to FT for the details. FT is just too huge for a reader to follow everything. We need a curated feed of hot news. At present VFTW and a couple other blogs are best at providing that.

It's conceivable that adding a thread Value Rating function to FT to allow automated identification of hot news. That idea has been kicking around for many years but there is doubt as to how well it would work.

oliver2002

I subscribe to a few twitter feeds of the various blogger platforms, so you get a vibe of whats going on. That said its usually stale news and once its picked by the majors, the minors also repeat it so there is a lot of noise.

Mary2e

Don't go to the blogs for anything. I think I've clicked on a few links, but that's about it.

IMH

Yes, but curated by someone who's primary aim is not to increase page views but to help us find real stories. The "must read" threads highlighted on FT's landing page are typically just click bait.

(Samples from today: "Knee defender" stories, BA adding pulled pork sandwich to F menu, family upset after airline lost mother... )

sbm12

I tried once. No real viable business model and not worth the time & effort involved.

jspira

How do you define "real stories" (while my question might sound facetious, I mean it quite earnestly).

I'm asking because that is the challenge newspaper and magazine editors face every day in terms of what is the lead story and what gets put on the magazine's cover, etc.

nsx

For an FT'er a real story is one with exceptional and timely practical value (major new or about to expire earning or redemption opportunity, major new or upcoming devaluation) or one with exceptional entertainment value (we all glance at tabloid covers).

IMH

Fair question -- and your explanation of the challenge points us towards answers: the skills of an editor are required, not a mere search engine optimizer. (Obviously there's an overlap: the home page of a web publication, like the cover of a magazine or the front page of a newspaper, has to grab and hold our attention.)

I can't give you a definition in three sentences, but I'll give you two more examples from the current FT landing page and assume we can all agree which is a real story (or was yesterday) and which isn't:

"Qantas Reports Record Annual Loss"

"Two Drunk, Unruly Women Blamed for Sunwing Plane's Fighter Jet Escort"

jspira

Thank you both for the useful and immediate feedback.

I think the two of you hit two sides of the coin. One major aspect of FT news is points and miles, but there is a huge avgeek culture here as well and airline news (new routes, new planes, financials) is also a part of it.

84fiero

I'm quite often left scratching my head at how FT staff select the "must read" stories. I wish I could remember some other recent ones that were just stupid or odd. But the BA pulled pork sandwich is a good example of a topic that, while it may be of very mild interest to someone with an upcoming BA F flight, hardly seems worthy of a "must read"!

benzemalyonnais

The thing is that we don't need the blogs at all.

They sometimes lift from here.

They sometimes get info from readers.

They sometimes get info from readers who lift it from here.

So yeah, I usually get the info from here, although I wish I knew as much about Delta as Delta Points does.

jspira

Well, using Frequent Business Traveler as an example, let me give you a look behind the editorial curtain.

First, we have multiple editors. My role is Editorial Director. While I have responsibility for news, we also have a News Editor (as well as an Associate Editor and a Tech Editor, etc.).

The news editor determines what the news writers will cover. We have a fairly massive system that gets over 1,000 news releases a day and sorts through them using algorithms and keywords we developed.

We have our own Style Guide that is enforced by a copy editor.

Finally, as Editorial Director, I assign reviews and feature stories (to myself and others).

When it comes to picking the "featured" article (top left of the magazine's webiste for example), it's somewhat simplified by the fact that these are all our stories.

We don't use anyone else's content and we don't aggregate content.

After writing this, our challenge is really what to assign, not what to put as featured.

We hope we are picking the right news and feature stories for our readers but we get generally positive feedback on this so I am optimistic we are doing something right.