The graph below shows search volume (for the word news) on a scale from 0 to 100. Volume was 100 in July 2005, and 96 in March 2011. Read about how Insights for Search works to learn more about the graph.

• @mashable, with a Klout score of 87, is as influential as New York Times, and more influential than any other publication on the list.
• @wikileaks and @techcrunch, with Klout scores of 85 (Wikileaks and TechCrunch),  are more influential than Wall Street Journal.
• @tmz and @gizmodo, with Klout scores of 80 (TMZ and Gizmodo), are more influential than New York Post and USA Today.
• @tbd, with a Klout score of 68, is more influential than Washington Post.
• @thedailybeast, with a Klout score of 78,  is more influential than the Boston Globe and Miami Herald.
• @propublica, with a Klout score of 73,  is more influential than the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune.

If you found this interesting, here are other  pages you might want to read:

• What is the Klout Score? Understanding the Influence Metric
• The Top 25 Newspapers on Twitter — Who’s Up, Who’s Down
• The top newspapers on Twitter? Try this list
• Mashable leads Twitter influence list
• Sites: Mashable, Wikileaks, TechCrunch, TMZ, Gizmodo,TBD, The Daily Beast, ProPublica

After Dylan Stableford (@stableford) published a list of top 25 newspapers on Twitter,  based on print circulation, Mathilde Piard  (@mathildepiard) followed with her own list of top newspapers on Twitter that “goes by number of followers on Twitter, not circulation.” I used the accounts from those posts to create the list below. Make sure to read those posts to learn about the selection process.

Here are the numbers. Click on a Twitter username to visit the account. Click on a Klout score for details about that measurement. Oh, and feel free to see the data in this Google Doc.

Why does this matter? Because news sites are publishing factual inaccuracies in articles that say things like “100 people recommend this” when in fact only 39 people did.

Here are the stories that I looked at this morning:

• CNN: Facebook event: Let’s dump trash at Boehner’s pad
  Claim: 2,071 recommends. Actual: 650 recommends (plus 769 shares and 653 comments)
• GigaOm: Facebook Open Sources Its Servers and Data Centers
  Claim: 593 likes. Actual: 291 (plus 232 shares and 70 comments)
• TechCrunch: Facebook’s “Open Compute Project”: Their Server/Datacenter Expertise Now Open To All
  Claim: 580 likes. Actual: 386 likes (plus 150 share and 44 comments)
• Mashable: Homeland Security to Issue Terror Warnings via Facebook & Twitter
  Claim: 578 likes. Actual: 120 likes (plus 245 shares and 213 comments)
• Politico: Joe Biden’s daughter trashes birther Donald Trump
  Claim: 143 like. Actual: 70 likes (plus 47 share and 26 comments)
• Engadget: LikeLight lights up your likes with Legos, Arduino (video)
  Claim: 143 likes. Actual: 70 likes (plus 54 shares and 19 comments)
• Today: New tool helps clean up your Facebook reputation
  Claim: 106 recommends. Actual: 40 recommends (plus 50 shares and 16 comments)
• WSJ Digits: Facebook Won’t Become E-Commerce Force, Analyst Says
  Claim: 101 likes. Actual: 34 likes (plus 51 shares and 16 comments)
• TIME: Obama Opens 2012 Campaign on Facebook
  Claim: 96 likes. Actual: 34 likes (plus 48 shares and 14 comments)
• USA Today: Facebook plea persuades man to donate a kidney
  Claim: 94 recommends. Actual: 51 recommends (plus 28 shares and 15 comments)
• All things D: Facebook’s Rise Is a Big Deal for Media Sites. For the Rest of the Web, Not So Much.
  Claim: 55 likes. Actual: 22 likes (plus 24 shares and 9 comments)
• Slate: No More Privacy Paranoia
  Claim: 62 likes. Actual: 22 likes (plus 32 shares and 8 comments)

All told, the like buttons claimed that those pages were liked or recommended 4,622 times. In fact, they were liked or recommended only 1,790 times.

In case you didn’t click on the first link in this post, I got the real “like” numbers by using my RealShare tool.

Feel free to take a look at the data in my malformed Google Doc.

Recently, a colleague mentioned that he thinks increasing page views is different from growing an audience. He’s right. Here are a few definitions of the phrase “page view” and the word audience.

Audience: One Merriam-Webster definition of audience is “a reading, viewing, or listening public.” Dictionary.com defines audience as “the persons reached by a book, radio or television broadcast, etc.”

Page view: Google defines a page view as “an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.” The Wikipedia definition is “a request to load a single HTML file (‘page’) of an Internet site.”

So page views measure how many times a page has been requested or loaded, regardless of how many many people (an audience) made those requests.

Imagine each reader as a diner in a restaurant, and each page as a menu item. One person could visit three times a day and consume three hearty investigative reports. She is still one diner. Maybe another patron really likes tasty pictures, and orders 20 of them in one sitting. He is still one person.

But that restaurant analogy only represents one part of a reading audience. What if one person reads three of your articles on his tablet, skims two of your blog posts on his mobile phone, glances over one of your tweets on his work computer and enjoys three of your pictures on his personal laptop. Although he has looked at nine pieces of content – three of which aren’t traditional “pages” – he is still one person.

So if not page views, what do you use to measure your audience? Leave your comments below.

Oh, and make sure to read these important posts about page views as a metric.

• News Media that use Galleries to increase Page-views don’t increase Time-spent (Attention)
• Gawker Gives Up Pageview Addiction, Quickly Picks Up a Monthly Uniques Habit
• Page views: bad metric #3
• Page view metrics? Bah, humbug!
• Measuring Visitor Engagement Take Two: Unique Visitors and Page Views
• The Death of the Pageview

Image courtesy of Stuart Mudie via Flickr.

Install

Drag the RealShare button below to your browser’s favorites/bookmarks bar (scroll down for a video showing how to do this), then visit any web page and click on the RealShare button to see the actual number of people who have shared, recommended, or commented on that page.

RealShare

What’s wrong?

Facebook’s Like Button plugin instructions provides an option to display the “total number of likes to the right of the button” but the documentation for their Share button explains that they really aggregate three numbers: “the total number of times the page was shared on Facebook, how many comments were added to the story shared on Facebook, and how many times friends Liked the shared story.”

In the screenshot below, it appears as if this story about WoW addiction was shared 313 times. The RealShare button reveals that it was actually shared only 138 times. The inflated number reflects those shares along with the 35 times the post was liked/recommended and the 140 comments left about that page.

What to do

Does the misleading number in that Facebook button put you at risk of losing credibility with your readers? Every reputable news provider (including independent bloggers) should answer that question. I’ve just disabled the Facebook button on this blog, and I hope you consider doing the same until Facebook fixes this accuracy and credibility problem.

Installation video

Thank you to Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) for asking the question, Clint Watson (@clintavo) for reporting the news back in July, and for All Facebook for its Facebook Like Count Calculator that inspired me to create this little tool.

Drag this button BackType Stats to your browser’s bookmarks tool bar. If you are using Explorer, make sure your “Links Toolbar” is showing, then right click on BackType Stats, click “Add to Favorites” and save the link in your “Links” folder.

Now, when you’re viewing any web page, just click on the “BackType Stats” button to see how that page is being shared and discussed on Twitter, Facebook and reddit.

I won’t get into the details of BackType, but it’s a service that shows at least these details about any web page:

• How many times a link to the page has been tweeted
• How many times those links have been clicked
• How many times the link has been shared on Facebook
• How many times the link has been liked on Facebook
• How comments have been posted on the page
• How many times the link has been commented on in Facebook
• How many times the link has been commented on in reddit

Take a look at BackType’s analysis of a post about the Knight News Challenge by The Nieman Journalism Lab.

Compare that to the search for the word news, which has held on to an increase of about 10% that it experienced in 2008.

People who use Google for search are looking for a little more news, and much less journalism.

What does this mean?

Do people want less journalism, or are they defining journalism differently? Should journalists start worrying less about journalism and more about news? Should they ignore these numbers? How should news organizations react? How does citizen journalism fit into this picture? Is there an empirical definition of news today?

The ability to share news was the second most important, but “following news sites via social networks” came in at the bottom of the list. Twice as many “news participators” found links important, and four times as many “other online news consumers” considered links an important feature.

Should news organizations and journalists focus less attention on gathering an audience on social networks and more attention on providing links?

In an exercise of irony, this post contains no links to related materials. To add to the irony, you can follow me on Twitter @ksablan.

All one: In two organizations, the three most popular Twitter users were all female. In 17 organizations, they were all male.

Anchor: Six of the most followed tweeting journalists have the word “anchor” or “host” in their job title.

Top 10: Two of the ten most followed on the list are female. Keep in mind this is only looking at the top three from each news organization.

Of course, the information can be sliced and diced to find many more interesting details, so take a look at the data and please share your findings in the comments below.

Update (8/21/09): This post has apparently served as the catalyst for the #folllowwomenjournas hashtag being used in tweets that include endorsements of specific women journalists.