Middletown Press Editor Viktoria Sundqvist explains how she and her staff of ten switched to a “digital first – print last” strategy in their newsroom:
We really don’t have too many pages – it is just a matter of perception and how you plan your day. It takes 30 seconds to stop and post something on Twitter, then continue with your page. I needed the three of them to understand this. I needed them to learn how to think “outside of the page.”
I picked three days when all of us would be there, I told the copy editors they would have to figure out how to run the website for the next three days, and then I left the room.
The copy editors spent an hour in the conference room debating and creating a strategy for the website:
They had come up with three shifts: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., 1 to 9 p.m. and 4 p.m. to midnight, covering the 14-hour period when most people are active on the internet.
Every copy editor would be responsible for the web for 5 hours each. The other three hours of their shifts would be spent working with reporters, editing things that came in, proofing the pages I was doing, returning phone calls, planning feature pages, etc.
After three days, the results showed promise:
One thing we noticed was that we seemed to have so many more stories once we started this strategy than we’d ever had before. We were also able to look at what stories got a lot of hits on the web, and what the comments were, before we determined where they should be placed in the paper.
We noticed a significant growth in web traffic during our experiment, but this slowed somewhat towards the end of the week. However, the drop-off rate from the early morning traffic into the afternoon slowed significantly, and the amount of time each person returned to the site increased dramatically. The amount of time each visitor spent on our site also increased.
Sandqvist’s long-term goal is a consistent 70% online/30% print split in how each copy editor allocates their time.
