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How did the project start?
In the wake of a significant investment in digital equipment and a strategic commitment to web publishing by our parent company, I was appointed digital editor of the Sunderland Echo to boost traffic and improve our proposition online.
What options did you consider?
It seemed clear for the day one that we needed to 1) produce more content for our site; 2) share more of our existing content to the website; 3) source content from third parties; 4) improve our search engine optimisation techniques; and - most importantly - 5) move towards a 'fast and first online' approach to the news.
1) We began a programme of producing video content regularly, and we now create an average of two videos per week
2) Our process means the sub-editors upload stories so now most paper content also features online.
3) I signed a key deal with Setanta Sports News to deliver video content in exchange for links to their site and channel info.
4) We constantly monitor our up-to-the-minute metrics so we can push popular stories, use social bookmarking site such as stumbleupon to market our content and have had great success - our most popular story of 2008 'Family's shock as porn twins reveal secret double life' http://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/Family39s-shock-as-porn-star.4518135.jp has received over 150,000 views after being marketed online on sites such as fark.com
5) We now break news online as a matter of course. From Nissan job losses to Roy Keane's exit from Sunderland our audience heard it first at sunderlandecho.com.
What help and expertise did you receive?
I sought advice from our digital publishing HQ in Peterborough, and started attending monthly 'technical editors' meetings to learn about best practise elsewhere. I went on site visits to Leeds and Preston, homes of our largest English titles and our flagship digital title respectively to pick the brains of the digital editors there.
Did you face and challenges or learn any lessons?
Changing the mindset of an experienced staff used to working with one means of delivering the news - print.
As the only solely 'digital' member of staff a key aspect of my role is enthusing our other 50 editorial employees about the web.
Nobody is forced to participate in our web activities, but now almost every Echo editorial employee is involved in either producing content for the website, uploading it or both.
I have strived to demonstrate the value of using the internet to reach our audience. Reverse publishing reaction to stories, comments and generating stories through tool such as our 'send us stories' button has helped to convince doubters. An example of the latter is when a user sent a photograph of controversial sweets designed to look like cigarettes which were being sold in a Sunderland store. This story was followed up and became a page lead in the newspaper edition.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
Web traffic has grown significantly over the last two years, rising from less than 80,000 unique users in March 2007 to 215,000 unique users in January 2009. That rise has been achieved despite a change to our metrics which now disregard non-human traffic.
Our site is now reaching a far wider audience. A spin-off benefit of this is we are able to promote our newspaper, which is still our primary source of revenue
What are your plans for the future?
Community and video will be the cornerstones of our strategy. We will exploit our parent company's recently announced deal to use Brightcove to deliver our videos online with more video content. We are also exploring social networking mechanisms so we can build on our forum community with a more user-friendly and dynamic tool.
