National Sports Journalism Center

Last fall I finally got up my courage and took a big step: I left my day job to go it alone as a freelance writer.

One reason I made the leap was I had a fair amount of work lined up for 2010: I had contracts to write a trio of kids’ books during the winter, and was fairly confident that a fourth deal would materialize. So I knew I’d have a bit of a cushion as I sought writing, editing and consulting jobs. (Another big help: I could go on my wife’s health-care plan.) I didn’t know if I’d find enough work to stay independent, but I figured I could try it for a while and not starve.

Besides, I saw another way to support myself: Faith and Fear in Flushing, the Mets blog I’d written with my friend Greg Prince since 2005. Over the years we’d seen traffic to Faith and Fear grow slowly but steadily, until we had some 250,000 page views a month – not an enormous amount of traffic, but pretty substantial for a team-focused blog. We’d never made any money from the blog, but then we’d never tried to: When I told my boss at The Wall Street Journal Online about Faith and Fear, one of his conditions for allowing me to continue blogging was that I not try to monetize it. (Even the t-shirts we sold were basically at cost.)

Now, Greg and I agreed, it was time to change: We’d put ads on our blog.

How much could we make? I had no idea, but given our traffic I thought we’d do OK. It didn’t seem crazy to think we’d each make $7,500 or so a year, which wasn’t a ton of money but would certainly be a big help for an independent writer. Besides, anything we made would be found money: We were already writing Mets posts, after all.

I didn’t know it, but I was on my way to a shocking discovery – and a valuable lesson.

Even as our traffic numbers grew, something about Faith and Fear puzzled me. We knew we had a core group of dedicated readers, fellow true believers who would greet our posts with their own stories and predictions and expressions of doubt, fear and occasional joy. Greg and I came to look forward to hearing from these folks, and over the years a number of them became friends we’d see at the ballpark. That was gratifying beyond measure, but I kept wondering about all the other readers – the silent ones who left no trace except in our traffic numbers. I’d chalk it up to the vagaries of the Web, tell myself that most members of a community were silent lurkers, or just try to ignore it. But it frustrated me. Why weren’t we connecting with them, too?

To sell ads we’d need a rate card, so we surveyed our readers, asking for basic demographic information as well as floating some ideas we were considering to pay the bills. We got a few hundred responses, including kind notes of support encouraging us to make some money for our efforts. That was heartening, but left me wondering about a new variant of the old question: A few hundred folks had taken the time to respond, but what about the thousands of daily readers who hadn’t?

For years we’d used an older blogging platform for Faith and Fear, one we’d picked because Greg could make it work on his rather ancient Mac. Now, we switched over to a WordPress platform, giving the blog a light redesign in the process. I was worried about the switch, but the bumps and bruises weren’t too bad – in large part because we had the same very helpful blog wizard for both platforms. The new redesign looked good. We had logical slots for ad placements, and the ability to tinker with a wealth of WordPress plug-ins. Everything was great.

Well, except one thing: We’d been seeing 6,000 to 8,000 page views a day, but in the first couple of days after the switchover, our daily page views fell to between 400 and 600. It was right before Christmas, but that big a dropoff was impossible. I knew all our redirects were working. Our new posts were showing up in search. I asked our blog wizard if he had an explanation, and he did: The old platform hadn’t been able to differentiate between search-engine robots and human visitors. He picked a random day – one with 7,091 page views – removed the requests from robots and spiders, and told me our real page views had been 1,066.

“Do you think 15 percent of our traffic = human traffic is consistent with normal patterns?” I asked, each letter strangely hard to type.

The answer was yes.

At that point I entered what I think in retrospect was some kind of catatonic state. For nearly two days, my brain basically refused to consider what I’d learned. Then it surrendered, and I got on with it.

I mentally balled up our grand advertising strategy and pitched it. That $7,500 tentatively added to 2010’s bottom line? Forget it. I was crushed and embarrassed to discover that those big traffic numbers had been vapor – the trails of mechanical searchers that weren’t interested in well-turned double plays or well-turned phrases.

But over the next few days I realized something else, something I felt better about. The mystery of the silent readers had been solved: They’d never existed in the first place. Yes, our real audience was much smaller than I’d thought, and that hurt. But now I saw that audience was incredibly committed. They read us faithfully, left marvelously funny and wise and anguished comments, passed along our work to others, invited us to games and tailgates, and even helped us out by taking boring polls when we asked them to. In worrying about silent readers we could never reach, I’d come perilously close to overlooking hundreds of passionate readers with whom we had the kind of connection writers dream of.

And I am not alone in this. One of the news industry’s crucial missteps in the digital age has been an obsession with big audience numbers with a shaky provenance. Too many newspapers that took to the Web boasted of reach, exulting in the fact that they could now reach a global audience. Some killjoy might grunt that the numbers seemed suspect when compared to print circulations or local audiences, but nobody wanted to look too closely, because the big numbers told a good story.

But it was a misleading one. Chasing phantom numbers left newspapers unable to connect with local advertisers who had no prayer of selling a car to a reader across the country and scant interest in buying an ad campaign with a business that couldn’t figure out its own metrics. Without those advertisers, newspaper websites got ads that were irrelevant to most readers, and those ineffective ads helped ad rates crater. And an obsession with big, empty numbers kept news organizations from learning how many of their page views were from essentially worthless “drive-by” readers and how many were from engaged, loyal readers. There was a valuable, committed audience out there, but it was lost amid ghosts, underserved and unappreciated.

I have learned my lesson – and I think our industry is learning something similar. Now I don’t think of 8,000 page views a day and what that might mean for selling ads. Instead, I think of 800 readers a day, and how Greg and I can make our connection with them even stronger. And I’m much happier trying to figure that out.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.