Andrew Trench notes from the revolution

Using the web to help you in print

DECIDING what we put in the paper each day and the kind of emphasis we give to stories occupies a great deal of our

Dispatch web interest in stories and what we publish in the paper - do they correlate?

time and is cause for plenty of debate in our newsroom.
We watch the indicators we can access and try and tweak out decisions according to the information to hand. Our weekly sales reports can give us a good idea if we hit the spot or not but, unfortunately, there are plenty of other factors that can influence the sale of a newspaper besides the story we have on the front page.
These can be anything from the weather (when its wet and cold we sell less) to the season of the year (I know, I know, it’s great mystery to us as well).
Of course we are also guided by reader research in adjusting our news offering..
So how do we know if we’re getting it right? Our circulation numbers are obviously a very clear indicator of success or failure but even these can be difficult to rely on. In a recession, such as the one we are experiencing at the moment, do we sell fewer newspapers because readers are disinterested in the news or because they can’t afford the paper as often as they used to?
Over the last 18 months we have had a new indicator which perhaps gives us a sharper, and more realtime view of whether we got our story mix right or wrong – our website.
The great joy of a website to an editor is the nearly instant feedback you get on your stories. Our website utilises tracking code which measures, among many other things, exactly what users are clicking on, how long they spent on an article and where they are from (don’t worry, we don’t know who you are – yet).
What’s handy about this is that we can use our website to tell us if our story selection has worked or not in an edition of the paper. The profile of our online users is not too different to our print readers besides being wealthier and obviously not all living in the Eastern Cape. Despite those differences, we’ve noticed that solid sales of the paper have generally co-incided with online users liking the stories we have projected in the physical paper. If they don’t co-incide it usually means an edition bombed.
We display the top read online stories on our site’s front page every day so you can see for yourself if we’ve been on the money or not.
As I write this our online users are showing me that we missed the mark over the last couple of days. Oops. Back to the news diary I go.