Afternoon. Seeing as it& #39;s Friday, I thought I& #39;d share some of the articles which most engaged regional news readers around the UK last month. We don& #39;t just look at page views (the currency which pays our wages), but also the amount of time people spend on an article (1)
All of the articles I& #39;ll link to here were read by at least 5,000 people who spent, each, at least 60 seconds actively engaging with the article - that& #39;s different to dwell time in that you have to be moving around the page, or doing something on the page (eg an interactive) (2)
What the list will show (as it does every month) is that this idea that we somehow can divide journalism between & #39;worthy& #39; (deep, meaningful, important) and & #39;clicky& #39; (shallow, done just for page views) is bonkers. Here goes.... (3)
First up, and well documented, @bristollive taking on the trolls who were pretty grim about Greta Thunberg when she came to Bristol recently. http://bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/abuse-threats-made-greta-thunberg-3897936.">https://bristolpost.co.uk/news/bris... In total, readers spent more than one million minutes on this article (4)
We get a fair amount of & #39;call this news& #39; about supermarket stories (maybe because Greggs is shut at the mo?), but this story with the latest opening hours and rules at Tesco and Aldi, kept readers for a combined 1.3m minutes, including on @WalesOnline: http://walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/latest-hours-rules-tesco-aldi-18005162">https://walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-n... (6)
Anyway: Local journalism is many things to many people. We should use data to understand what engages people. In my opinion, local journalism& #39;s future depends on how much we pay attention to how readers engage with stories. Not rocket science, but worth repeating sometimes....
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