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January 06, 2006
More on Belmont suicide
Because of increased competition for readers' time and declining daily newspaper circulation, editors are under more pressure than ever to take advantage of opportunities to boost newsstand sales. Here is an internal memo from Mark Travis, a longtime editor here who is currently working with the staff to improve the Monitor's website:
Because Thursday's story mix had such stark choices between 'serious' state house and Medicare news and 'sensational' suicide and DWI mom stories, and because of Mike's blog on suicide sensationalism, I was very curious to see how readers voted with their website usage. As you probably noticed, I put the mom arrest and the suicide on our online front page yesterday, displacing the two wire stories we ran on the print front page.
Usage results from our daily stats:
1) Mom arrested for driving drunk: 4,079 readers
2) Man kills himself with guillotine: 2,996
3) Housekeeper swiped jewelry: 1,152
4) Truck bursts into flame on highway: 936 (and never on our online front page)
5) Beastie the cat is back: 920 (front page only after 5 p.m.)
....
13) Seniors going without drugs as plan debuts: 568 (our lead online story all day)
....
22) Session starts with ethics feud: 438 (lead print story, on online front page until 5 p.m.)
To those numbers I'd add this additional info: Yesterday's online readers spent the most time on the site (5.2 minutes on average) and read the most articles (5.2 page views on average) of any single day over the past month. Both figures were the highest we've seen in 30 days.
I'd never argue that reader interest should be the only factor in determining A1 play, and as someone whose life has been touched by a suicide I share Mike's concerns about how we play them. But based on these numbers I'd also say this: We had a paper Thursday with very strong single-copy sales potential, and that paper we put on B1 instead of A1. On the other hand, the B section was surely read like few others!
Mark
Posted by Mike Pride at January 6, 2006 12:53 PM