I spent my morning listening to an intelligent talk by Joshua Benton from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard – Eight trends for journalism in 2011: A Nieman Lab talk in Toronto (Audio and Slides). What really caught my eye was his 7th trend: New Front Pages!

And specifically his quote:

“[The front page is] still an enormously powerful engine of traffic. I would say actually that for most American newspapers […] it’s probably 70 percent in a lot of cases.”

This is exactly how we view the world at Visual Revenue; the Front Page is a Channel. A channel the size of Search, and for most branded media destinations, potentially bigger! That being the case, your first question as a publisher should be, what kind of optimization am I applying to my single biggest traffic driver, the front page ?

Here are the 8 trends:

1. Tivo for news
2. More sharing of content, in both directions
3. The singles model for news
4. We’ll do it live
5. Big boom in smartphones
6. Trimming back in nonprofits
7. New front pages
8. A shift in Google results

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)