Editor's Daily Note 12/02/2019
AGENDA
Regular morning meeting, 8 am Mountain.
Welcome back all. We should be a full strength and ready to go. Can’t wait.
DAILY
We made it through the long weekend -- lots of good copy, flow was good. Saturday was probably our lowest readership day of the year -- a little more than 10k uniques. It started to increase on Sunday and we will see what it looks like going forward.
The month of November was not bad. We had 442,000 unique users, 517,000 sessions, and 741,500 page views.
I am still wondering why we dropped below 500k on uniques. I wonder if the algorithm from Facebook changed on some of our links. I will try to take some time to look at that today.
One important perspective: A Year to Year comparison. We had 262,563 unique users a year ago November. So even though a 500-plus number is cool … it is not reflective of the readership gains we have made.
Yes I would like to get to a steady base of half a million (and then a million). But we will get there by paying attention to the basics and building a smart news program. We don’t need to rush.
Read More
NOTES
A lot of lessons from the holiday stretch. (Which will be useful during the Christmas - New Year’s week.)
We need a better way to chart what stories we have in reserve and where they are. I got confused on Saturday and moved a Deetz piece earlier than I should have. That would have left a hole on Saturday, but we were lucky with lots of AP copy.
We need to make sure we have someone on standby to edit. EVERY piece that we post should be edited (including mine). This is essential. It’s too easy for any one writer to miss style or have a sentence that’s confusing. All writers need editors.
We also need a plan to edit AP copy. We need to feed the beast. (And AP copy has started to gain traction with readers.) Ideally for now we’d have three or four stories in the morning and again toward the end of the day.
(Then perhaps we should wait until a managing editor is named … that could be an immediate task, scheduling.)
Speaking of scheduling. We need to think about social media again. As I wrote last week, we were making real progress gaining viewers on IG. ONly to have it become a once-in-a-while post. Ideally we will hire someone to do this, but that won’t happen right away.
We also learned about the potential of the wire. In addition to posting a story, there is nothing wrong with using AP copy to bolster our own story. We should do this when it serves readers and allows us to be faster in our coverage of a topic.
