1. What’s been the biggest change to the site in the last 3 years?

The Hedon Blog has had an annual facelift and theme change each year of its existence, but the last theme change concentrated on highlighting news content (with more photos and visual impact), rather than being just about listing links to useful information.

So the latest theme has only one side bar, more featured images and a featured news slider.

The biggest change is the success of the blog’s adopted parent site HU12 Online which has allowed us to develop a news service for the villages surrounding the town of Hedon.

Comments are a lot more visible on the blog too, reflecting a general increase in those during the year.

2. What sort of traffic do you now get and how has that changed?

Whilst not taking them too seriously, the blog has passed certain milestones this year i.e. half a million views, first time with over 2,500 views in one day (satisfying because in our first month of existence in Feb 2009 the blog got just 251 views), and the biggest hits to date on a particular article with over 4,000 on Hedon - Scene of Bomb Scare.

For two months of this year views went over 25,000.

However, I don’t take WordPress.com statistics too seriously, and still measure my own success by how much articles and issues are being talked about in the locality, on the blog, and on the site’s social media networks.

3. Have you seen any changes in the way that audiences interact with you?

Audience interaction has changed over the last two years – for a period the ‘success’ of the blog’s Facebook Page seemed to lead to less comments on the blog itself; an article on the blog is posted to Facebook and the discussions around it took place there rather than on the blog, probably because people felt more comfortable on Facebook.

However, in recent months this trend seems to be reversing, with a deeper and broader discussion on issues taking place on the blog – perhaps more people now feel that the blog is a safe and comfortable place to engage?

The ‘official’ audience has how increased too – I get more press releases sent to me from public, private and voluntary sector groups by e-mail, than I get sent by local community groups and activists.

Most of the input to the blog in the early days used to come from the people I bumped into and the posters I discovered while on my ‘Blog Beat’ – now it’s a myriad of sources including e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

However, I continue to do the daily (mostly) blog beat of my patch and am still discovering new issues, stories and contacts that way.

4. How would you describe your relationship with the traditional media in the area?

I have developed a very close association with the Holderness Gazette weekly newspaper and from November 2012 have become their Hedon correspondent.

I submit material and photographs on a weekly basis and receive payment for these plus a retainer for providing the service.

I have a relationship informally agreed with the local Hull Daily Mail that involves them using blog material as filler items in their publication.

The payback for blog readers is that they know that by sending stuff to the blog it is quite likely to appear in the Gazette, but will also be picked up by the Mail.

It is clear that local media pick up lots of items via the blog and then run with them to create their own news stories.

I do not consider other media as competitive or threatening in any way.

5. What new blogs, bloggers or websites have you seen which you think are doing this stuff well?

The site I admire locally is HU17.net, all about Beverley. Paul Smith is a wonderful photographer and website designer. He also seems to have cracked the issue of income generation! From a local media point of view, Paul is ‘Mr Beverley’!

I also like ‘On the Wight‘ Isle of Wight News – I’ve had the added advantage of being able to follow their development story through the annual Talk About Local Unconference events.

Talk About Local are a gateway to lots of hyperlocal websites that genuinely excite and inspire me, although making time to network with other groups proves difficult.

6. What story, feature or series are you most proud of over the past couple of years?

In June this year Hedon experienced a bomb scare. I was the first media outlet on the scene, and whilst I couldn’t blog about it instantly (lack of kit), I could tweet the images of the police cordon and interview the locals helping out on the scene and photograph the events as they unfolded – almost felt like a journalist for a moment or two!

The events which really built the Hedon Blog audience however, and probably helped turn it from a by-stander website, into an influential one, was the ‘Hedon Pong’ campaign of 2011.

In short this involved the blog taking part in a community campaign against a smelly sewage works in the vicinity of the town.

The website hosted the campaign petition and published a ‘wall of shame’ highlighting people’s reactions to the foul odours polluting the local area. It covered the campaign story from beginning to end.

The campaign was successful leading to the water company concerned investing heavily into odour control (£3.5m), and also providing a £50,000 community grants fund by way of compensation. As a result of this campaign the Hedon Blog was much more widely known and respected.

7. What is currently your biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge facing the Hedon Blog is simple survival.

The website was managed on pure passion and fresh air in its first three years – in the last 18 months I’ve survived on the pulling together of some meagre resources generated through advertising, fees for stories and photos sold, and working tax credits.

The challenge was and remains the garnering together of enough resources and people to be able to – not only continue, but – do much more.

8. What are your plans for the future?

A longstanding aim is to create a ‘Hedon Local News Hub’ that can formally recognise and support local news-gathering and news-sharing, and offer training and resources to those interested in becoming ‘beat bloggers’ or citizen-journalists – with the overall aim of creating a really positive press all about the town and its surrounding villages.

A step towards all of this will be creating a ‘Friends of….’ group with a constitution that is geared towards and able to access grant funding.

9. What one thing would most help you to move successfully to the next phase of the site’s development?

The ‘employment’ of a salesperson who understands hyperlocal and can sell advertising space on HU12 Online just might be that ‘one big thing’!

Magazines on Twitter – percentage of followers retweeting – click for interactive version

Magazine Twitter accounts with the highest click-through rates tend to be aimed more directly at the reader and to give the reader a clearly defined reason to engage, according to an analysis by Patrick Scott in the second of a series of three posts.

Follow @Patrick_E_Scott

When analysing the engagement on the Twitter accounts of regional newspapers we saw that one of the key factors was how conversational the newspaper was with its followers. But does this still apply when dealing with national publications?

In this post we will see that there is less evidence to suggest that following a larger proportion of your followers is a signal for higher levels of engagement.

However there is a greater disparity between magazines who are successful in engaging their followers and those who are not with one magazine attracting as many as 3.5 clicks for every 100 followers and one attracting as few as 6 clicks for every 10,000.

Twitter click through on magazine accounts

Twitter is a curious beast because of the potential it has to make content go viral. However, there is no hard and fast formula for writing an engaging tweet and we will see that some magazines are really struggling to do so.

I analysed the twitter accounts of 10 well established UK based magazines, covering a wide range of topics and owned by a range of companies. The results are displayed in the graph below.

Magazines on Twitter – percentage of followers clicking through – click for interactive version

• Stuff Magazine tops the list with an extremely impressive 3.5% of followers clicking through and Empire also does well with 1.28%.
• British Vogue does the worst of the 10 with only 0.06% of followers clicking through.

Followers per followed – less important for magazines

In the first post of this series we saw that regional newspapers that have a better following per followed ratio tend to have a higher level of engagement. This correlation doesn’t exist in the data for magazines.

The ‘Followers Per Followed’ number is the relationship between the number that follow a Twitter account and the number that the account itself follows. For example, the Empire Magazine Twitter account follows 1 person for every 632 followers it has.

Magazines on Twitter – followers per followed – click for interactive version

When flicking between the graphs on the interactive version of the chart, we can see that it doesn’t really matter how many people you follow. Stuff Magazine follows a far higher number of people relative to the number of followers it has than Empire, but both of them have a high click through percentage.

The Private Eye account doesn’t follow anybody (I gave it a value in the graph above purely so it wouldn’t skew the rest of the data) and yet it gets the third highest percentage of followers clicking through.

It seems that followers do not require their magazines to follow them back. This could be because they are national publications and in contrast to regional newspapers do not cater to a local community. Or it could simply be that magazines are able to engage without following back.

Magazines can afford to have a more asymmetrical twitter account.

Tweets with a simple goal are more engaging

It may seem like an obvious statement to make, but tweets which provide the reader with a clear way to engage get a higher percentage of click throughs.

Some magazines do this better than others. For example, Empire is very good at focusing the reader with the first word of a tweet.

 ‘Here’s Russell Crowe’ immediately makes it apparent what the reader will get when they engage with the tweet. It did very well, attracting over 7,500 clicks. In contrast, this tweet from Rugby World Magazine is less specific and only attracted 117 clicks despite the fact that the link was tweeted 3 times.

It is also interesting to note that informal tweets, like the Empire tweet, tend to do better than tweets, like the Rugby World tweet, that sound more like news headlines.

Tweets from national newspapers are more engaging when they pique the interest of the follower than when they directly promote content.

Stuff magazine uses more hashtags in comparison to the other magazines and this could be a reason why it does so well. By using a hashtag other people using that hashtag will be able to see your tweet whether they are following you or not.

Magazines won’t alienate people if they have a poor followed per follower ratio, so they can afford to try and reach as many people as possible with their tweets.

Magazine groups: IPC Media and Conde Nast have the lowest engagement

On a company level IPC Media and Conde Nast do poorly in comparison to their competitors in terms of both click through percentage and the less important measure of retweet percentage.

Magazine Owners on Twitter – percentage of followers clicking through – click for interactive version

Magazine Owners on Twitter – percentage of followers retweeting – click for interactive version

It is interesting to note that these are two of the companies in charge of the most magazine titles. It would be interesting to know if each publication within these companies was allowed to formulate its own tweets or whether there was an overall policy on tweet composition implemented by the companies.

My short ebook Data Journalism Heist is now available on Amazon for Kindle (US link here - also available on other countries’ Amazon sites).

The book is an introduction to data journalism and two simple techniques in particular: finding story leads using pivot tables and advanced filters.

The book also covers useful sources of data, how to follow leads up, and how to tell the resulting story.

You can also buy it from Leanpub, where it’s been live for a couple months now and is available in PDF, mobi and ePub formats. Comments welcome as always.

1. When were the sites launched?

After about six months of fact finding and market research, the first site – MyWelshpool – was launched on Friday 13^th, August 2010. Luckily it has been far from a horror story since!

MyNewtown followed in December that year and then MyBrecon and MyRadnor joined the portfolio in 2012.

2. What made you decide to set up the sites?

I had moved back to the UK after many years in the Middle East and it didn’t take long to realise that the impact of the traditional local media was diminishing, not just in Mid Wales but across the UK.

Newspaper sales were dropping as readers turned to the internet for their news and information.

Initially I was going to set up a free newspaper or maybe a magazine but they would have been short lived based on the research that was carried out prior to launching the web sites.

The demand for our news shows that decision was the right one.

3. How did you go about it?

I spent a lot of time talking to local people and businesses. Finding out what they wanted from their local media outlets. And, of course, how they were getting their fix of local news.

What shocked me was that many people were no longer buying local papers and therefore totally missing out on local issues.

I did a survey of 100 people of different ages and it pointed to the need for a fresh way of delivering local news through the internet.

I then set up a Facebook page called the Welshpool Dictionary, to gauge local internet use.

The page reached 2,000 followers in six weeks so there was our audience.

The groundwork had been done and gave the confidence to move forward.

4. What other websites influenced you?

At that time, there were very few hyperlocal media sites in the UK so we ended learning from the experiences of a site in Canada. They were very helpful.

It was seen then, as it is now, as a risk so not many people of newspaper groups were willing to give it a go.

5. How did – and do – you see yourself in relation to a traditional news operation?

We see ourselves as a credible media company and a market leader in the industry.

We have launched four sites in three years – I can’t think of many media groups launching four newspapers in that time?

6. What have been the key moments in the sites’ development editorially?

In 2012 we were successful in winning a grant from Nesta as part of their Destination Local programme to help us develop our operation with apps for the mobile platforms and the two new sites.

It helped us accelerate our plans to enter new markets and as a result we have got a huge part of Mid Wales covered that was otherwise slipping into a black hole.

7. What sort of traffic do you get and how has that changed over time?

Our numbers continue to grow. Our latest milestone was reaching 30,000 unique users viewing 200,000 pages of news in a single month. We also have more than 10,000 social media followers.

We link our stories from Facebook and Twitter to the sites to drive up traffic numbers, providing a free ‘news alert’ service for our readers.

8. What is / has been your biggest challenge to date?

Convincing the public sector to use us.

Organisations like Powys County Council and the Welsh Government (WAG) spend ludicrous amounts on public notices in local newspapers. We simply tell them that we have a bigger audience, can do it for a lot less money, thus saving them huge amounts of tax payers’ money for a better impact – it’s not rocket science.

However, they continue to be hamstrung by outdated legislation which is bordering on illegal in this day and age.

Once organisations like Powys and the WAG start working with us, we can then invest in more sites, more journalists, more resources and an even better service for the user. It will save the local media industry and allow it to flourish.

9. What story, feature or series are you most proud of? 

We have written thousands of stories since we started.

The beauty of our service and technology is that we can see, through the back office, what type of stories are popular and what people like to read. This influences the content of the sites so stories we know will be more popular will be more prominent and we can spend less time on stories that turn people off.

Newspapers can’t do this and it makes me smirk when I see a big front page splash of a story that had hardly raised an eye brow with our readers days earlier.

10. What are your plans for the future?

Right now we are in a period of consolidation.

Our revenues rose about 25% last year but we also invested heavily so the next 12 months will be about striking the right balance. MyTown Media Ltd’s sites must stand the test of time and continue to evolve to meet reader needs but it can only be done though common sense.

However, in future, I would like to perhaps look at linking the company’s online platforms with other media outlets operating in the area, maybe buy a radio station or the local paper!

Regional newspapers on Twitter – percentage of followers retweeting – click for interactive version

Newspaper Twitter accounts with the highest click-through rates tend to follow more people, customise tweets for Twitter and engage in more conversation, according to an analysis by Patrick Scott in the first of a series of three posts.

The number of followers a Twitter account has is often assumed to be representative of the influence they command. But is it what we should be measuring?

An initial analysis on my blog suggested that as far as engagement goes it doesn’t matter whether you have millions of followers, hundreds of thousands, or just thousands receiving your updates.

On average fewer than 0.5% of followers – of celebrities, a magazine and a local newspaper account – clicked on links shared.

In this post we analyse click-through rates of ten newspaper Twitter accounts and find that the proportion of followers that click on links varies enormously: from almost 1 click for every 100 followers to 4 in every 10,000.

Twitter click-through on regional paper accounts

For regional newspapers engagement and distribution through social media is becoming increasingly important as more publications become online-only.

Whether the paper is operating on a model that rewards the number of clicks the site gets or on a subscription based model, social media must be used as a way of attracting business.

I analysed the click-through rate of 10 regional papers across a range of owners and locations. The results can be seen in the graph below.

Regional newspaper Twitter accounts click-through rates – click to view interactive version

As with my initial research the data shows that click-through rates represent a tiny fraction of the amount of followers a newspaper has.

• The Northampton Chronicle and the Lancashire Evening Post top the list with 0.9% and 0.83% average click-through rates respectively.
• The Birmingham Post was the least successful at enticing its followers to click through with an average of 0.04%.

Followers per followed – a metric of engagement?

The most interesting trend in the data shown here is the relationship between click-through rate and the number I have slightly confusingly called ‘Followers Per Followed’.

The ‘Followers Per Followed’ number is the relationship between the number that follow a Twitter account and the number that the account itself follows. For example, The Birmingham Post Twitter account follows 1 person for every 662 followers it has.

Regional newspaper Twitter accounts followers per followed – click to see interactive version

If you flick from chart to chart in the interactive version you will notice that the papers with a higher click-through rate by and large also have a lower ‘Followers Per Followed’ ratio.

In other words, the most successful newspaper Twitter accounts (as far as click-through is concerned) follow more people, relative to their own follower numbers.

This flies in the face of the notion that it is cool to have many more people following you than you follow.

It does not, however, necessarily mean that following people back in itself results in more click-throughs.

Following more Twitter users may be a symptom of something else – a latent variable: for example, in indication of how engaged an account is with its own followers.

For instance, The Oxford Times, which does badly on click-throughs, appears to automatically republish web headlines with very little regard to how they appear on a Twitter feed.

In contrast to this the Northampton Chronicle, which does well on click-throughts, tweets headlines that are designed to be read on Twitter and are more attention-grabbing as a result.

We also looked at the number of @ tweets or hashtags that the paper was using.

This showed a similar difference in approach between the Northampton Chronicle – which posted around 8 @ tweets in 24 hours – and The Oxford Times, which don’t post any.

The Northampton Chronicle engages with more people – and they engage back.

Newspaper groups: Johnston Press has the highest engagement

On a group level Johnston Press Newspapers titles (Northampton Chronicle, Scotsman and LEP) hammer the competition in terms of click-through rates and re-tweets (although the retweet measure is not as significant).

Regional newspaper groups on Twitter – percentage of followers clicking links – click to see interactive version

Regional newspapers on Twitter – % of followers retweeting – click to see interactive version

Both titles follow a far greater number of people than their competitors in relative terms (interactive version of chart available here). Their Twitter model is far more symmetrical than their competitors.

Regional newspapers on Twitter – followers per followed – click to see interactive version

Judging from the recent profit announcements made by Johnston Press it probably couldn’t hurt for other newspaper owners to take a leaf out of their book.

Case 5: Your friend witnesses a fatal beating

This isn’t a particularly nice story. Your source tells you that last night she saw a man being beaten so badly that he died afterwards.

You ask questions about where the attack took place, the victim, the attackers, and what was said and done during the attack.

You decide to write a story from what she has told you.

The questions

1. What are the legal issues here – and what tests need to be met for them to be an issue?
2. What defence(s) could you mount?
3. How likely is it that legal action would result?
4. Would you publish – and why?

Case 4: your Facebook page starts getting some nasty comments

You run a Facebook page for a university society group, publishing news about what the group is doing, links to relevant events, and how-tos.

One week, while you are on holiday, a series of hateful comments appear on the site, all from different accounts.

• One is a joke by Member A about Jews which many commenters think is sick.
• In response, Member B says that all Muslims should be beaten up on sight;
• A further comment by Member C adds “homosexuals” to the list for the same treatment;
• And for good measure Member D says “Polacks” should be beaten up too – although you know the commenter personally and think the term was used in a tongue-in-cheek fashion (given the timestamp you suspect she was under the influence).

A few days later Member E messages you directly to tell you about those messages, and ask that two commenters be kicked off the page.

To complicate things further, it isn’t the first time that Member E has asked you to kick people off the page – they have been arguing both privately and publicly on the page that a number of openly gay people are trying to ‘hijack’ the group and openly gay members should not be allowed to join it.

The questions

1. What are the legal issues here – and what tests need to be met for them to be an issue?
2. What defence could you mount?
3. How likely is it that legal action would result?
4. Would you publish – and why?

Case 3: Judge criticises heavy handed police

Here’s another true story. You are attending magistrate’s court in your search for stories. One case related to a breach of bail conditions.

As the defendant hadn’t reported to a police station as required, seven police officers went to his house to find out why. 

The magistrate questioned why it had taken so many police.

“Clearly there is no crime in Heretown if so many police could be spared.”

The defendant was put on an electronic tag instead.

You decide to write a story along the lines of ‘magistrate criticises police’ against the background of the case.

The questions

1. What are the legal issues here – and what tests need to be met for them to be an issue?
2. Would you publish – and why?

Case 2: Celebrity visit – and you don’t have pictures

This is a true story. A fire drill has just ended, and as you’re walking back to the classroom you think you see a famous rugby player in the crowd. Your friend says “Nah, it’s not him”.

Like a good journalist, you don’t accept that, so you go to the university reception to ask if Famous Rugby Player is indeed around today. Yes, they say, he is.

Apparently he’s promoting a healthy eating scheme – and also looking at a new piece of kit designed by the health faculty.

You get the details of what he’s doing there, and where he will be when, make a quick call to your editor, and then chase off to find him.

Once there, you interview him, a marketing rep from the company paying him, and a representative from the health faculty.

But your phone runs out of battery – so you have no photos.

As you get back to the newsroom, Famous Rugby Star’s visit is already all over Twitter.

You want to get this story up on your blog before the local newspaper – but a celebrity story is nothing without images.

Thankfully, a few of those tweeting about the visit have taken snaps. Also, one has uploaded some brief video footage to YouTube, and embedding is enabled.

Meanwhile, you have emailed the marketing rep and the health faculty rep for images – both have been promised, but you have no idea how long it will take.

The questions

1. What are the legal issues here – and what tests need to be met for them to be an issue (or not)?
2. What defence could you mount?
3. How likely is it that legal action would result?
4. Would you publish – and why?

I hope you can comment on what a student publisher might do – and why.

Here’s the first:

Case 1: major fast food outlet selling food it should have binned

It is 4am and you are sat with a friend in a fast food chain outlet. This is a well known, global brand – you can choose either McDonalds or Burger King, because these things matter.

Your friend works for the same company, in another city. She turns to you and says:

“That food should have been thrown away two hours ago.”

She knows because she can see the timestamps on the food packaging behind the counter.

The next day you prepare to write up a news article about this.

You find some useful background: the company has published its own policy on how long food should be kept out, for example. You also have the Food Standards Agency report for the outlet (it was satisfactory).

Your headline reports just what your friend said: that the particular outlet was serving food that was hours old, and breaking its own guidelines in the process.

You have a quote from your friend, who is named, and her position as an employee of the fast food chain is mentioned. She is fine with this.

You seek a reaction from both the outlet and the fast food chain’s central office. Both refuse to comment, and you have included that in your article.

The questions

1. What are the legal issues here – and what tests need to be met for them to be an issue?
2. What defence could you mount?
3. How likely is it that legal action would result?
4. Would you publish – and why?