Twitter has been getting a lot of buzz recently as a networked way to send out micro-updates to your network of friends. [What’s Twitter? web.aan.org/twitter]

Newspapers like the New York Times have been using Twitter to send updates to their followers on the network, following the 2.0 Mantra of Web Publishing: “Get Your Content Out to Your Audience - Wherever They Are.”

But, no denying it, it can be time-consuming to “tweet” every update to your site.

Enter Twitterfeed.com.

Twitterfeed allows you to submit any RSS feed, and select how often it will send updates to your Twitter account.

Admittedly, papers who publish 100+ articles on a weekly basis won’t find Twitterfeed that useful, as it can only send out 5 updates per refresh cycle. And the automagic-posting means you’ll lose a little flexibility on the formatting side:

I think this service could be a good match for papers who update their content periodically throughout the day, or those seeking a new distribution/publication mechanism for their papers’ blogs.

Of course, Twitter can only drive traffic to your site if you have a network of folks receiving updates.

To see how it works, sign up for an account, and add AAN as your friend at Twitter.com/altweeklies.

[NERD NOTE: Pownce is poised to become the new Twitter; it combines short messages with events and file-sharing. Pownce is currently in beta mode, but once it’s open to the public I’ll write it up. if you’re on it, add me as a friend. ]

Hitwise, an online marketing firm, released a study earlier this month on online trends in Top US News Media for the period from March 2006 - March 2007.

Among their findings?

Online video is huge - the number of folks leaving a News site and heading to a video site rose by 196 percent, especially when a news story involved user-generated video content.

Why is this important to alt papers?

I’ll argue that the rise in folks leaving news sites for video sites is a very pressing issue for newspapers - it represents not only a major traffic leak, but a decline in credibility for a news organization.

In the age of YouTube, folks want to see things for themselves - and newspapers that publish a story without including relevant video footage are leaving out a major component of the story. In moments, a user can Google “David Hasselhoff drunk,” - and instantly get sucked into the instant-gratification world of YouTube. Will they return to your site to read your columnist’s insightfully snarky analysis of the cultural event - or will they watch the related spoof videos?

How do I plug this traffic gap and keep users on my site?

Thanks to a dubious business decision on the part of video-sharing sites, the solution is simple … cut and paste.

I’ve included allegedly-drunken footage of David Hasselhoff above - if you’re interested, you can watch it here, without leaving the site.

Including the footage on my site - even though it is branded with another site’s logo - allows me to capture any traffic gains by folks who might discuss the footage in comments below, instead of on another site where they might find the video.

The traffic leak of folks leaving newspaper sites for video sites illustrates one of the central tenants of this blog - that if newspaper sites want to succeed, they will have to invest more energy into creating well rounded and comprehensive web content - optimized for the web experience, instead of a 1/2 page of newsprint and a 600 word editorial hole.

Other findings of interest in the Hitwise report include …

• Market share of visits to the top 10 News sites declined 2.3 percent
• Search engines and news aggregators were the leading sources of traffic to News sites - increasing by 29.7 percent for ‘print’ media sites.
• Traffic to celebrity gossip sites rose expontentially.
  
• Local news aggregator Topix.net saw a rise in market share of 81 percent - with above average representation in rural areas.

• Digg did not yet serve as a major source of upstream traffic to News sites.

(This study is by no means comprehensive - it focused on the Top 10 News and Media sites, including Yahoo! and Google News, and papers like USA Today and the New York Times.)

Link via The IndiePub Blog