Critical
Reflection
After the success of last semester’s WINOL (a local-news
based online student editorial site in the UK), during which we managed to
achieve an Alexa Rank of #476,793 globally and #10,338 within the UK, I chose
to reprise my role as social media editor as I felt there were a lot of ways I
could try to make the process of using social media more efficient for us to use
as the improved use of this medium seemed to help radically improve our overall
circulation.
The first step of this was to ensure that, at the beginning
of the semester, I keep up a good twitter and Facebook presence to remind
people that the website was once again operational. Whilst doing this, I also
started researching other social media platforms that could be used to help us
gain and maintain popularity as a local student journalism site. As well as
finding out which would be most helpful and applicable to our needs, I also had
to teach myself how to use them. Once things had become more settled in the
news room, I began to compile a Social Media usage guide available
on my blog which outlined the best ways to make use of our current social
media profiles and how we could use newer sites to expand our audience and
therefore increase our viewing figures. These included ways of making the
process of posting messages more efficient, ways of increasing our online
presence and increasing the number of people following our social media output
which would then increase our page views. Whilst listing and presenting these
concepts was relatively simple, trying to implement them into practice was
considerably more challenging. As these new plans involved reporters serious
alterations to the speed in which things are processed and the order in which
reporters needed to upload their various articles. Whilst this was initially
met with a certain amount of enthusiasm from the team, very little action was
taken upon these initial recommendations. To try to encourage use of the points
outlined in the document I also created an abridged version, also
available on my blog, as I felt the length of the original post may
discourage people from reading it. On top of this, I ensured I thoroughly
briefed the team and made it incredibly clear that I would available to help if
they needed. However, the notions made in the handbook were never properly
implemented and many of the actions introduced were quickly lost to habit.
To an extent, this struggle to embrace innovation is
reflected in the circulation statistics that I collected as an additional part
of this role and have been posted
on my blog. Over the semester our Alexa rank largely improved. Alexa.com is
a website that makes rough estimates of websites' popularity over a period of 3
months; the lower the number, the more views the website has had. I began collecting
this information on the 23rd January and we had a global rank of #460,940
and #33,950 in the UK. At our peak, on the 6th March our global rank was #372,251
and we ranked #9,154 in the UK, our best rankings on record. However, after
this point our rank began to slip; the following week our UK rank remained the
same and our global rank was down 16,099 points to #388,350. To try and improve
our slipping viewing figures, I ensured the team was fully briefed, explaining
how Alexa works on a 3 month average and the reason we had not noticed this
overall fall in site visitors before was because it seemed likely to be due to
the skew created by our absence over the Christmas holidays but that this was
no longer applicable to the period of time being averaged. Some members of the
team met this idea with criticism, feeling that our work had been considerably
improved since then and that the viewing figures should reflect that,
especially due to some great spikes in visits seen in many of the Eastleigh
by-election articles, and argued that the figures still included the poor
figures from over the break. However, both other members of the time and I worked
out the number of weeks ago the average started from and proved that it the time
period of the average did not include the break, that even if it were it would
have already been counted in all our previous averages and finally explained
that whilst we may have had good peaks on some days, many others have had a fairly
poor viewing result.
To try and improve upon these, I gave several solutions; the
first and major one was to get reporters to promote the site on their accounts
to spread awareness amongst people that may previously not have been aware of
their work on WINOL or even that our local news site existed. Another that
should have given a dramatic improvement was to ‘mention’ people involved in
stories or groups that are likely to be interested in an article by ‘tagging’
them in twitter posts. By doing this, they are more likely to see the story and
potentially share the tweet with their followers, potentially doubling the
number of people that see that tweet and potentially follow the link to the
article. This is especially good for sports stories as there are plenty of team
and sport fan pages on twitter as well as profiles for a lot of the players of
many of the sports. However few of these recommendations were acted upon by
others which made the resulting improvement minimal compared to its potential
impact if properly supported. Still, there was considerable improvement in
viewing figures and social media use at the end of the semester and whilst our ending
Alexa rank of #373,953 globally and #12,025 in Great Britain on 27th
March might not have been as good as it was at our peak on 6th March,
it was still an improvement on our final results from last semester of #476,793
globally, though we were ranked lower in the UK as we had achieved a rank of
#10,338 at the same point in the previous semester.
As well as this, I also took on the role of Editor of new
magazine site UK Today, a site that
finds and compares the best Student Journalism in the UK, to try and get it running
and improve my writing skills. The main difficulty in this was trying to
balance the time needed to research and write the stories for the site whilst
maintaining an effective presence in my role of Social Media Editor. Due to the
difficulties I had in my role of social media editor, my work for this site had
to take a back seat and therefore the project never really took off the ground.
Another issue I had with running the site was that where it was completely new,
there was no previous format or style to follow and, if necessary, improve
upon. This made it difficult to find the right way to approach the articles and
I had to make a lot of decisions on the tone, structure and content which is
difficult when there are no real guidelines already in place.
However, I managed to find some time to try out some of the
production roles. This began when the production team were short a few members
and asked if I could operate a camera for them. Since then I have been used on camera several
times for live bulletins and pre-recorded content. I was also able to help in
the gallery when we opened up the studio to allow anyone who wanted the
opportunity to have a go at presenting for their show reel. During this, I was
able to learn about how many of the technical aspects work and have a go at
filling the roles of director, sound person and autocue operator as well as
camera person. Often when on camera I have also had to act as a floor manager,
in some respects, as the talkback for the presenter was not working and
therefore had to rely on me to cue them in and relay information and queries
from the gallery. I also tried to turn my hand at comment writing by trying to
start a series of satirical news-based letters and job applications but this,
much like UK Today, had to take a back seat due to social media commitments.
From this, I have learnt a lot about time management and prioritising
projects as well as the way in which a news team needs structure to work
properly and how various roles and systems work. Next year, to improve upon the
use of social media, I would recommend greater use of facebook and twitter as by maintaining a good social media
presence helps create greater awareness. I would particularly recommend more
use of mentions in tweets to target people likely to have an interest in the
article as a way of getting more people to follow the link back to our site. These
ideas and many more that would improve viewing figures through social media use
are outlined in my social media guide and I would recommend anyone wishing to
take on this role read through these if only to gain a greater insight into
what things are likely to help and to see what protocols are already either in
play or are ready to be implemented. In terms of looking at our circulation, I
think we should try to move away from using alexa.com in favour of google
analytics as this would be more in line with the way industry works. We should
also use the ‘slim stat’ app on Word Press for more detailed and specific information
on what our audience is particularly interested on our site to help us find out
what style of articles we should try to focus on. Also, if UK Today were to
continue next year, I would suggest to the editor to work out the exact tone
and style they were looking for before starting any other work on it and to lay
out these ideas in their own style guide for the site. As well as this, I would
suggest they try to distribute the work between a small team of 2 or 3 other
people as it is far difficult to run the entire site on your own. I am hoping to
change roles next year and have decided to try to become the overall editor of
WINOL as from my position as social media editor I have been able to observe
all aspects of WINOL and seen both its positive and negative qualities and have
come up with several recommendations to help improve WINOL’s efficiency, quality
and therefore its popularity and viewing figures. Many of these recommendations
have been outlined in my manifesto which I have submitted to my lecturers.
In general, WINOL has continued to improve this semester. It
had maintained its lead, in terms of Alexa rank, against its closest rival East
London Lines, seen in these graphs from my circulation blog post:
However, the quality of some aspects their articles
(especially their still photography) far surpass our own. If we were to improve
this, largely by ceasing our reliance on stills taken from VTs, our site would
look more professional and therefore more likely to be frequently read. Having
better quality photos would also help with our social media use as many of the
sites we use show greater favour to posts with aesthetically pleasing photos to
purely text based updates. A great enhancement made to WINOL’s content this
semester is the continued improvement of our features section which makes our
site ‘sticky,’ meaning that people spend much more time on the site after
finding, in this case, an interesting feature than they had not initially
intended to read whilst checking on the latest news. He have added several new
magazines including the popular New Winchester Review which takes a look at culture
and arts locally, nationally and internationally as well as maintained our popular
magazines like Absolute:ly – our beauty, fashion and gossip based women’s
magazine.
Overall, I feel that WINOL has still been fairly successful
this semester and, perhaps, if we had not made such dramatic improvements last
semester our achievements would seem even more impressive. Of course, there are
still some flaws that should be ironed out – our news slider stopped working
for several weeks, subbing stories needs to speed up and checked better and the
turnover time for features between filming and upload can still be a little
long – but our work has continued to improve which is still reflected in our
overall popularity and rank.
Word count: 2,123
