2022 Site Review

 This post presents site data for 2022.  The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week). Click on the site review tab for previous years.

The four noticeable spikes here are the South Australian election, the federal election, the Tasmanian council elections and the Victorian state election.  2022 has seen the most traffic to this site in its history, beating the previous busiest year, 2018, by 35%.  The week after federal election night had nearly 80,000 unique pageviews, which was 2.41 times the previous highest!

Notice: No Free Interviews List

NOTE 13/4: At present this list is not active (other than the boycott on Sky News) following technical assistance from a supporter.  However newspapers that do not give me free subscriptions should be warned that they may be refused interviews without warning at any time should the problem recur.

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This page is a list of media sources to which I am no longer providing most free interviews until further notice.  (See carve-outs below.)

The major reason I refuse to provide free interviews to some media is hard paywalls.  I like being able to see online media stories relevant to my work in explaining polling and electoral themes to the public immediately.  I especially find it absurd if I do a story for a paper and then I cannot see how they have written up the interview without paying for it.

Some newspaper "paywalls" are not actually true paywalls and it is easy to read the material on the pages in various ways.  However in recent times some papers have become much tighter in preventing access.

I do have free access to image files of most newspapers but this is slow and cumbersome, and doesn't help with articles that have not yet appeared in print editions.

Sure, newspapers have to make money, and paywalls are an entirely legitimate part of that.  But exploiting sources by taking their expert comments, making money from the story, and giving the source not even free access back is not - at least, I refuse to be part of it, even though I would otherwise like to help them to improve their coverage of political and polling matters.  It is not viable for me to subscribe to every newspaper I need access to - I would need to do much more paid work to do so, and then I would not have time to do interviews anyway.  

Not all outlets with hard paywalls will be put on the list.  Outlets that hire me will not be listed if they happen to have a hard paywall, but those on the list below have never hired me.  Also there are some local rural papers that I don't have cause to read much and may not mind giving an interview to despite being paywalled.  And if I happen to have an easy way around the paywall - whatever it is - then a paper won't be on the list.  

Once newspapers are added to the list I may, for a few weeks of grace period, provide the odd free interview to journalists from said paper who ring me up and are unaware of the boycott.  They will then be told about it and asked to pass it up the line.  

Also, this list applies only to electoral/political/polling interviews.  Interviews relating to my scientific work or chess are not affected (except in the case of chess for Sky News).  

Exemptions may be made in specific cases - these will usually be ones that involve the media giving me something I might not otherwise see, such as full results of a poll.

This list will be edited from time to time.  

On list for hard paywall

Outlets will be removed from this list if they provide me with a free subscription or hire me to write for them from time to time.  Note that I do not approach outlets with pitches, but I do accept commissions.

Currently no outlets are on the list for hard paywall.  

On list for other reasons

Sky News

Sky News was involved in a beatup about an ABC interview about chess and racism that I was involved in.  To be interviewed by me again without payment in advance, Sky News must to my satisfaction broadcast an apology for airing material that characterised an interview I was involved in before it had been conducted, for inappropriately using tournament footage of Tasmanian chessplayers including me as background to its culture war on this matter without the consent of all involved, and for making no effort to present a balanced presentation of facts or opinions concerning the story.

The Mercury

The Mercury is on the no free interviews list as of 17 May 2024 for this disgraceful effort: debiting my partner's card $15 for a subscription the day after (or possibly the day of) she cancelled her subscription by phone a week prior to the subscription ending as required, and was told it was cancelled.  Furthermore the subscription they charged her for stopped working after her cancellation was processed, and then they told us it would be refunded and then didn't refund it.  To be interviewed by me again without payment in advance, The Mercury must without further efforts on our part refund the money, tell me it has done so and send us both a letter of apology.  

2021 Site Review

This post presents site data for 2021.  The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week):

Most of the activity in the year came between late February and early June, including the WA election, the Tasmanian state election and the Braddon recount.  The peak for the Tasmanian state election in early May was the fourth most visited week in site history (behind 2016 federal, 2018 Victoria and 2019 federal) and May overall was the fourth most visited month (behind the months of 2016 federal, 2019 federal and 2014 Tasmania/South Australia.)  

Updated note to email subscribers

 In June I posted a note to say that the Feedburner system that sends out automated emails from this site was "going away" (ie stopping working).  I was expecting this to take effect from the end of June, but the date seems to have now been pushed back to mid-August, and most of my posts seem to have still been sent out via the email system in the meantime.  There may be further changes and at this stage I cannot be sure that the existing email feed will stop working altogether at any time.  

In the event of the Feedburner feed stopping working (ie I am still posting articles but subscribers are not receiving emails about them) then I recommend that email subscribers sign up to other services that will allow you to enter your email address and a site name and receive an email feed of that site.  You may want to bookmark this post to come back to it should you realise you haven't heard anything from me for more than a few weeks and wonder why.  Anyone who wants to be sure of getting any article I write may want to sign up to such a service right away.

In comments to the previous article commenter Et3e! mentioned two example feed sites: feedrabbit.com and blogtrottr,com.  I have tested these and find that they work in more or less the same way except that Blogtrottr includes ads with the email of the article text. 

I've considered maintaining my own email list about the site and decided not to do it - too labour intensive and fiddly.  (I edited an email newsletter for a few years once and have no desire to repeat the experience.)

I should caution that both Feedburner and Blogtrottr are very fast in sending out emails (depending on the options chosen).  Initial release versions of articles are often sent out when an issue is fresh and information is emerging - they are more likely to contain typos, unfinished sentences and other errors.  I often say that I only have time to write this stuff, not to proofread it! I view all articles on this site as like a one-person Wikipedia - often I get them out as quickly as I can, but the articles are polished and more content often added later.  So what you get in the initial email and what the article looks like 24 hours later are sometimes rather different.  

I also recommend that anyone wanting to sign up to a feed of this site starting from now uses one of these services or find another similar service.  I've taken down the link to the Feedburner feed signup because I am not sure if the signup system is still working.  If Feedburner reverses all these mooted changes and does so in a language I can understand I may restore it.  

Email subscription changes

Up until now this site has offered an email subscription service, though I'm not sure how many people would have seen it.  Tucked in the bottom right hand of the page, for anyone who ever scrolled down that far, has been a space marked "Follow by email" where an email address can be entered.  At least in theory, anyone who enters their address then gets emailed the text of articles that are posted on this site, sometime within a day or so after the articles being posted.  (As one of the subscribers myself, I've found this to be more than a little hit and miss.)

The email service started rather slowly - this site started in October 2012 and by the end of 2012 only my mother and I were subscribed to it.  However it's continued to pick up subscribers over time.  Weirdly the smallest number of new subscribers was picked up in 2019 (a federal election year and a busy year for the site) while 2018 saw one of the largest numbers of new subscribers.  

For some time there's been an announcement inside my Blogger console that the Feedburner email service is "going away", which is a curiously quaint way of saying it aint gonna work any more.  I believe this takes effect from this week.

After (one by one, because there wasn't any other way!) culling over a thousand spam signups from the list, I've downloaded a file of the 110 genuine email subscriptions so that I may be able to, in future, transfer these over to a new email system providing the same service.  However, while I am pretty familiar with using mailing list sites such as MailChimp, what I don't know is how to replicate what the existing Feedburner service does.  That is, I don't know how to set up a service that will monitor my site, notice when I've got a completely new post up, and at that point (or preferably several hours later when I've culled out most of the gremlins and typos) send out an email to subscribers.  Also, of course, I would want to be able to put something in the sidebar where people could subscribe to this site.  

If anyone does know how to do this (and maybe someone will tell me immediately!), please let me know.  Otherwise, the email subscription service may be on hold for a short time, a long time or permanently pending me working out how to (and whether to) best replace it.  

If/once a new system is up to date, details will be posted.  

Update (11 July)

The article I posted yesterday has still gone out via the existing email system, so perhaps the change has not taken effect yet.  I'm continuing to explore and test alternatives (see comments) while I wait to see what happens.  

2020 Site Review

 This post presents site data for 2020.  The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week):

Nothing much happened in the first half of the year except for a bad Newspoll for the government in mid-January.  However there were significant spikes of interest for the Eden-Monaro by-election, the Tasmanian Legislative Council elections, the NT election, the ACT election and the Queensland election.  The ACT election is the largest of the spikes above.

With it being neither a federal election year nor a Tasmanian state election year, traffic was well down on 2018 and 2019 (down 47% on 2019) and only exceeded the traffic for one other year so far, 2015 (this site started in 2012).  I also felt early in the year that COVID was swamping all other news consumption, leading to low interest levels in anything else.  

In 2020 I released 59 articles including this one.  This is the smallest number for a completed year so far (the previous lowest was 77) and a major cause of that has been the decline in both federal and state polling.  The most common subjects were federal polling (8 articles), the Queensland election (7), and the NT, ACT and Tasmanian Legislative Council elections (4 each).

2019 Site Review

This post presents site data for 2019.  The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week):

Hmm, also looks a fair bit like my income pattern for the year.  There were three big events within two months early in the year - the NSW state election, the Tasmanian Legislative Council elections and the 2019 federal election, but the back half of the year has been extremely quiet, bar a small flutter of interest in September that was partly caused by an unusually exciting Tasmanian recount.  It is not just that the second half of the year was such a quiet one, but also the 2019 federal election aftermath was considerably less interesting than either 2013 or 2016, with only one remotely close Senate race and no House of Reps recounts (among other things).  As a result of all this, site traffic was down 22.5% on 2018 (which was the busiest year here to date) and also down 5.1% on the previous federal election year, 2016, making this year the third best for site traffic so far.  

2018 Site Review

This post presents site data for 2018, which was the most successful year on this site so far.  The rate of unique pageviews was 22.5% higher than in the busiest previous year (2016).  Here's the activity graph for the year (the units are unique pageviews per week):

The first part of the year actually started similarly to 2014, with roughly similar levels of interest in the Tasmanian and South Australian state elections.  However this year had the bonus features of the Super Saturday and Wentworth by-elections, and there was also more interest than in 2014 in my coverage of both the Tasmanian local government elections and the Victorian state election (the big spike on the right).  Partly this was because I wasn't working on anything else at the time Victoria rolled around and was therefore able to put much more effort into analysis of the Victorian upper house especially.  It's pleasing that people supported these efforts with donations - while I'm in no danger of getting rich from them, it does mean I can put major effort into covering an election and feel that the pay is something like real work!

2016 Site Review

Another year done for a site that is now just over four years old.  When I started this site I intended it just as an interim site while I explored other options, but in spite of some very minor frustrations (like difficulty in stopping spammers from even submitting comments) I've seen no compelling reason to move.

This year was a federal election year and the activity pattern for the year looks like this (the units are sessions per week):

The federal election and its post-count events basically swamp everything else.  Senate reform performance reviews maintained a high level of reader interest through to mid-August and after that the rest of the year was quieter, with little spikes for the ACT and NT elections. The massive federal election spike meant that this year had about 128% more traffic than last year, and about 60% more than the previous busiest year (2014).

How To Best Use Your Vote In The New Senate System

This piece is written to provide advice on the best way voters can use their vote effectively in the new Senate system.  Many regular readers of the site will already be aware of many of the points below.  I hope the main part of the post will also be useful, however, for those who want to know what advice to give less politically engaged (or more easily confused) voters.  I will vote below the line and number every square under the new system, and I'm sure many other readers will too (at least in the smaller states!), but not everyone is up for that.

Under the old Senate system, you had a very simple choice.  You could vote for a party above the line and your vote would be distributed according to your party's registered ticket, or you could vote for candidates below the line, in which case you knew you had to number nearly all the squares or your vote would not be counted.

That old system has been scrapped.  Voting all the way below the line for sometimes 100+ candidates was too difficult, confusing or time consuming for most voters, and above-the-line voting was being gamed by micro-party preference deals that meant most voters would have no idea what their vote would actually do.  Not only that, but problems with this system meant that the loss of a small number of votes in WA caused the whole WA Senate election to have to be re-run at massive cost.

2015 Site Review

That's another calendar year done for a site that's now a little over three years old.  Federal elections and Tasmanian state elections are this site's biggest events, so with neither of these in 2015 it's no surprise traffic here was down 43% on 2014 and down about 10% on 2013.  Still, with two state elections and the dumping of a sitting Prime Minister, the year was not exactly quiet.

The pattern for the year (the units are sessions per week) looks like this:

The two big spikes on the left are the Queensland and the New South Wales elections, and the Queensland one would have been bigger had my efforts not been limited by a major field trip.  On the right, interest fell sharply once the Canning by-election was out of the way.  The major difference between the Turnbull readings and even the quietest Abbott readings suggests to me that a lot of left-wing readers are more interested in reading about good polling for their side than bad.

2014 site review

That's just about the end of the second full year since this site started; so it's time for the annual stats review.  Obviously with a Tasmanian state election to cover this has been an even bigger year than last year, with about a 58% increase in site traffic.

In my 2013 annual review I noted that in late July 2013 I switched from Blogger Stats to Google Analytics to keep track of site activity.  Just as well, as early this year Blogger Stats started getting swamped by bot hits to the point that it would often rack up several hundred overseas hits a day even when there had been nothing new posted for a week.

This year I released 86 articles of which 19 concerned the Tasmanian state election and 17 were federal polling roundups.  As usual I finished almost everything I started - but I never got around to doing a final wrap for the Tas state election.  Also languishing incompletely in the Drafts vault thus far are:

* a full debunking of some ludicrous social-science rubbish re Tasmanian Devils unwisely published by The Conversation (I gave it plenty in the comments section; also see a rebuttal from scientists working on the species.)

* a critique of a Bob Brown Foundation skew-poll about the proposed revocation of part of the World Heritage Area (had this not come in the heat of the state campaign, or had the revocation had a snowflake's chance of success, I may have finished writing up that one.)

* a glossary of all the big words used on here.

In compiling the list of top ten articles for the year I had a decision to make.  Some articles get lots of hits from visitors refreshing for live coverage or revisiting for updates.  At the same time, an article that gets lots of repeat visits often does so because it is a long article with updates that could have been split into multiple posts if I felt like it.  When in doubt, aggregate, so ...
  

2013 site review

This site started in October 2012 after I left Tasmanian Times*.    This is my second "annual" list of the most popular articles of the year and other stats trivia, but obviously the first one to cover a full year ... and what a year in Australian elections and poll-watching it has been!  

For the first half of the year I was using the Stats function in Blogger to keep track of site activity.  However, the Stats function has a number of drawbacks.  Not only is it very prone to hits from automated, non-authentic traffic (including pulses of up to 300 hits at a time), but there is a thing called vampirestat that swamps your post visit stats as a claimed source of site visits.  Sites where articles are frequently edited (as mine are to add updates) seem to be unusually prone to getting their site stats clogged by vampirestat.  

Another drawback with the Blogger Stats function is that it actually misses (or loses) genuine hits.  In late July I started using Google Analytics.  I'd read before that because Google Analytics does a better job of not counting non-genuine traffic, it tends to return lower hit totals (to the dismay of some blog-owners' egos).  But in my case the totals returned by Analytics have been substantially higher, even if only counting unique user hits.

In future I expect to only use Google Analytics for tracking site stats.
  
The ten most popular articles this year (sorted by number of visits) have been:

Post updating

Just a quick note to say that I often update old posts on this site with fresh comments and information.

The Legislative Council challenger guide, which is about to dislodge The Abbott Factor as this site's most frequently visited article, is updated regularly.

LegCo Ices Forestry Peace Surrender Deal has also been recently updated (and is likely to be updated further in the near future), and Silly Lilleys: Is Wayne Swan Losing His Seat? had a major update in early March - albeit before last week's leadership chaos, the impact of which on polling is yet to be seen.

In the near future I'll add a list of recently updated articles to the sidebar - and try to keep it up to date!

NOTE ADDED 2020 - as this is an old post of no significance I am using it as a de facto Photobucket.

Federal 2PP estimate feature added

 (Note: This article documents the experimental phase of the aggregate, which ran from February to September 2013.  For transitional arrangements post the election see here.)

I've just added a subjective two-party-preferred vote (2PP) estimate feature on the sidebar.  The reason I have added this feature is that I commonly get involved in discussions on various sites in which someone is making claims about the likely state of the national 2PP that aren't even remotely credible, or just getting confused about all the different polls and the strange range of values they spit out.  I think a fair few people will from time to time be interested in my view of where things are at, especially when having those kinds of debates while I'm not around.  There are some handy formal aggregators about, but they often take a few days to update and I often find my view a little out from theirs (and usually somewhere in the middle of them all), typically because everyone has slightly different views on the best underlying assumptions.  When I can, I'll be aiming to update this estimate quickly.

The 2PP estimate is not a fully formalised aggregator and is not a scientific test. I'm not at the point of being ready to attempt something like that yet, and while I have a long-running Newspoll rolling-average of sorts for historical comparison purposes, I've only recently developed an interest in trying to gauge the picture across all federal pollsters.  It's just my hopefully informed opinion on the basis of an informal and at this stage loosely defined aggregation process.  The rough assumptions I make in thinking about the national 2PP are as follows.  (Note: Article has been edited to give the current version.  Legacy text appears at the bottom so people can see how this model has developed.)

2012 site review

This site has only been going since late October when I left Tasmanian Times.  I intend to continue it in its current form for some time though I may eventually change to another format, especially as the commenting and comment moderation options on this one are a bit limited.  Apart from that I am happy with how it is going. 

I've finished and published every article I've started, except for a detailed rant about the silliness of claims that Tasmanian Devils are on "the verge of extinction" and similar politicised nonsense about the species.  As the Tarkine mining controversies heats up and the species' plight is politically misused in those matters as it has been in so many others, very likely at some point I will become motivated/irritated enough to complete that one too. 

The ten most popular articles on this site in terms of site hits so far have been, in order:

1. The Abbott Factor: Opposition Leader Ratings and Party Standing

This article, published in October, showed that there is a relationship between the ratings of established Opposition Leaders and their party's two-party-preferred standing, such that the unpopularity of Tony Abbott could be costing the Coalition 1-2 points of voting intention.  It also showed that during the Abbott tenure, this relationship had until recently worked in the opposite direction to normal.

Freedom!

This is the probably temporary home of former Tasmanian Times psephologist Dr Kevin Bonham, who has quit the site as a psephologist and regular commenter over a moderation dispute after coming close to doing so several times before.  More advanced things will follow in the future, probably on different sites when I've had more time to explore, in the areas of psephology and discussion of Tasmanian and Australian politics and public life.  There might even be formatting or pictures someday!

People wishing to contact me by email about all this may do so at k_bonham@tassie.net.au

A Twitter feed at https://twitter.com/kevinbonham will keep those on said service up to date with my movements, new articles and significant pseph releases.

You can also subscribe to this site via email at the bottom right of screen (scroll right down).

Comments are moderated for the time being and guest posting is hopefully disallowed.

My standards for moderation will become clearer over time but for starters, no block capitals, no strawmanning, no Godwin's Law violations, no defo, no plagiarism except of the Sisters of Mercy, no misquoting (do not use quote marks when paraphrasing), general swim between the flags sort of stuff.

Oh, and of course, some attempt to stay on topic, as rather loosely construed, may be required from time to time.

You're welcome.