I’m often asked ‘how many readers do you have online?’. While the proper way to count online readers is constantly being debated, there are a few companies that do an excellent job of conservatively counting readership.

According to comScore The London Free Press web site had a total monthly readership of 301,000 (total number of unique visitors who came to our site at least once during the month) and an average daily readership of 34,000 during a rolling 3-month period from October to December 2009.  This daily average includes weekends, with our weekday average climbing above 40,000 per day.

By comparison no other media outlet in London comes even close. The next highest media web site (radio, TV, magazine or web-only) tops out at 2,000 visitors per day and 13,000 per month according to comScore.

We appear to have a loyal group of readers who have made it a habit to visit our site regularly and then a lot of readers who have been directed to our site to see a particular article once or twice a month.

Our next challenge, or biggest opportunity if you want to think of it that way, is to find ways to encourage our large number of occasional readers to make it a habit to visit our site more regularly.  There are various ways to do this; our efforts in social media in particular (Twitter and Facebook) now represent >5% of the traffic that we see each day.

All in all I think we continue to do quite well given the size of our city.  But there is definitely room for growth…

@SteveatLFPress

I am going to fail and that is the most important thing I could do for The London Free Press these days.

Am I planning on failing? Of course not. But we have reached a stage in the evolution of mainstream media that demands experimentation. And experimentation invariably comes bundled with a healthy degree of failure. So I am hoping that 2010 will see an abundance of new projects; some of which will ruffle feathers within the ranks of our larger organization, some will alienate certain of our audience, and others will just plain fall flat.

But we will also have a few successes, and only by experimenting will we find out what will be successful and what will not be. If I reach my goal we will have a new experiment each month this year.

Let’s see what happens…

@SteveatLFPress

I’m often asked what the future might look like for newspaper companies, especially in an era where social media and digital technologies are developing at an exponential pace.  I firmly believe that we are less than five years away from a digital device in a form factor that would lend itself well to mass appeal and adoption.

LG Display 19" flexible electronic-paper screen

In my mind there are two camps vying for this space. One is the ‘tablet’ camp, touting a device that effectively replaces your computer with a lightweight, easy to carry ‘computer screen’ that operates like an over-sized iPhone.  The rumoured Apple iSlate is the next generation of such a device. Apparently we should expect a big announcement in this area from Steve Jobs and Apple on January 26th.

The other school of thought is that the traditional newspaper layout will live on in ‘digital paper’. The proponents of this approach are placing an emphasis on the portability, flexibility and familiar look and feel of this type of device.

A big leap forward in this area is expected now that LG Display has reportedly announced this week that they will begin mass production of a electronic paper screen later this year.

While it will take some time for manufacturers to integrate this screen into an actual device — complete with software and a power source — it allows us to envision a day in the not so distant future when a screen like this could be sitting on a kitchen table displaying our local newspaper.

And the really exciting part…this technology will probably be all but obsolete by 2015.

@SteveatLFPress

There has been much criticism over the time that I have worked here around the fact that we do not do a sufficient job adding hyperlinks within articles. We often post articles with an accompanying URL but do not take the extra time to ‘activate’ the URL through the use of hyperlink code. A brief explanation is in order as well as a promise of better things to come.

The current work flow for our content management system sees many of our articles added to the printed newspaper before they appear online. This is not some underhanded attempt to boost print circulation by withholding stories, but is merely a function of deadlines. Often times a reporter will be working on a story well into the evening. Occasionally they are trying to confirm details with sources, or they may simply be working on a particular story only after other assignments have been completed. For a variety of reasons these articles first appear in our print product. What then happens is an automated process that converts our printed paper to XML, which is then loaded up to our web site overnight.

The following morning our web team gets their first crack at the story in order to ’stage’ it (to use the interior design terminology) and make it more interactive.

Now, when a story is ready to be filed during the day it goes through a different process. The reporter posts the story on the site and alerts the online team, who then immediately begins the process of staging the article to optimize it for online reading.

Amongst the tasks they take on:

• activating any URLs included in the article
• looking for additional areas where linking could add context to the article
• adding related maps
• uploading associated documents to our Scribd account and inserting into the article
• linking the article to any related videos that have been shot and uploaded
• Adding the Livestream video player when live video will be broadcast
• connecting the article to related photo galleries
• inserting any ‘Twitter boxes’ to display tweets coming in real time from a reporter

Beginning shortly we will be changing the work flow such that all stories are ’staged’ in this manner when they are loaded; the hope being that you will no longer find an inactive URL as part of a story.

If you have any questions on this topic or how it can be improved upon, feel free to drop them into the comments or send me a message on Twitter.

@SteveatLFPress

As I tweeted about on New Year’s Day, I’ve resolved to blog more regularly this year. The newspaper industry is in a state of flux, and with the innovative business models and news delivery advances coming so fast it would be irresponsible not to document as much of this evolution as possible.

So I was thrilled when I read that a BlackBerry app for WordPress was released in beta this past fall. This is my first post with the app and so far so good.

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s hoping for an exciting and prosperous 2010.

@SteveatLFPress

Holy cow, these past 36 hours have been a complete blur.  We launched the new lfpress.com web site yesterday morning and while reviews have been decidedly mixed, I finally feel like we’re on a platform from which we can grow the way we need to.

I’m not going to post a whole heckuva lot right now because I need to get my compass realigned and need to absorb the feedback we’ve received.  What has been amazing to me is how polarizing of an issue this has become.  The response that we’ve received has been all over the map. Some people absolutely love the new design, with it’s wider layout and more intuitive navigation bar; others find it a hideous monstrosity and are calling for my immediate termination.

Anyway, I hope that most of you like where we’re trying to go. We’re far from being where I want us to be but this new site is a good step in the right direction.

@SteveatLFPress