It’s no secret that Stuff leads the Herald in terms of the number of pageviews, audience reach and unique user base it attracts on a monthly basis, but this is by no means the only metric that advertisers are interested in tracking. Engagement stats, particularly through social media, are becoming increasingly important in terms of determining the value of a placing an ad on a digital media property. So, in order to gauge the effectiveness of both publications in terms of engagement, Frank Feinstein, director at Feinstein Doaks, surveyed 2.5 million Facebook interactions on the flagship Facebook pages of both the Herald and Stuff.

Nielsen has released its annual list of the top ten websites Kiwis visited over the course of December. And while the list was populated by the usual suspects, there were a few surprises in terms of the year-on-year changes for some of the websites.

Fairfax has updated the entire Stuff platform by migrating it to Adobe’s cloud-based content management system called Adobe Experience Manager. And the media company’s product development director Robert Hutchinson says that the company aims to become as flexible as BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post in terms of its digital storytelling capabilities.

Fairfax is starting to challenge the Herald’s dominance in Auckland with a series of campaigns that aim to draw the Super City’s denizens to its publication. The most recent effort involved an activation at Art in the Dark, which saw event attendees queue in long lines to enter the Stuff tent to get a shot at literally creating art out of light. Once inside the tent, Kiwis would be given LED glowsticks and were then told to draw or write in the air. These actions were then captured using long-exposure photography, resulting in a host of creative images that were tagged with the Stuff brand.

Recently, StopPress ran a story in which Fairfax’s group executive editor Sinead Boucher said Stuff was working on a strategy to overtake Yahoo in terms of online visitor numbers. And this has now come to fruition with Nielsen’s statistics for October showing that the Fairfax-owned media property received more unique visitors over the course of the month than Yahoo.

It doesn’t take much to get a scolding on social media these days and the masses always smell blood when whoopsies like the AFR’s major front page gaffe, or the Herald’s mistaken identity (and mixed up movie quotes) are spotted. And here’s another (small) one from Stuff on a story about Dunedin.

Greenpeace has been left in the awkward position of inadvertently distributing the photography of Alain Marfat-Renodier, a man who was involved in the 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand. This situation comes about after it was revealed that one of Marfat’s photographs taken of a variety of animals around a Namibian watering hole was included in the not-for-profit organisation’s annual calendar (image credit: Stuff).

An unfortunate coincidence perhaps, but it was chokes from all quarters on the Stuff website earlier this morning as the lead headline screamed about Emirates Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup loss while further down on the front page there was a story about a US doctor saving a lady who choked on a piece of meat.

We had to wonder recently if Stuff’s website was trying to show us what happens when the honeymoon is over – as its wallpaper promoting a dating site shared the front page with a less romantic story.

Last week Vodafone took out the awkward ad placement award, and we’ve got a contender for this week’s edition, with an ad on Stuff promoting ‘beach fale fun in the sun’ in Samoa running alongside a story warning of a tsunami. Pesky news, always wreaking havoc with those commercial messages.

Journalists in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but we feel this editorial decision by Stuff should be preserved for posterity.

With only so many minutes in the day (1440 to be precise) there’s not much time for lolly-gagging about when looking for which news articles are worth reading and which are not. Ferald is an extension for the Chrome browser which takes the hassle out of this equation for New Zealander news consumers.

Not surprisingly, the relaunch of the New Zealand Herald as a tabloid and the redesign of the nzherald.co.nz website have dominated most of the attention in the newspaper sphere in recent weeks. But Fairfax has a few tricks up its sleeve as well and it has announced the launch of Stuff Nation, a repository for user-generated content and a more personalised news experience that promises to “transform the landscape of New Zealand journalism”—and the way Fairfax Digital delivers media packages in New Zealand.

The race for convergence means hitherto distinct media entities are cutting each other’s lunch. TV and radio stations now have their own news websites, while news sites are increasingly moving into TV’s realm with video content. We wrote about it a few months back, and now the country’s most popular news site is now officially available on the big screen, as Fairfax Digital launches its Stuff IPTV Channel on Sony Internet TVs (smart TVs).