Farmers Weekly did not think it stood at chance at last night’s AOP awards, its online editor told Press Gazette today. But it ended up walking away with two gongs.
Julian Gairdner was crowned best digital editorial individual, beating Pete Picton at Sun Online and David Moynihan at NME.com. Farmers Weekly also won best business editorial team at the event last night.
Gairdner said: “We didn’t even think we stood a change against some of the other candidates.”
He explained that the new Farmers Weekly website is now able to offer content that could not be published in the magazine, such as video, additional images and blogs.
“It has been a very big year for Farmers Weekly, with a design and a new platform for the website,” he said. “We have been hugely successful with traffic.
“We are very committed, and are willing to try new things. We have had a raft of initiatives on the website including blogs and video content.”
He said the successful parts of the site were aimed at small communities, such as the Taking Stock and Agribusiness blogs.
“They have a niche purpose, which means it was easy to get sponsorship for them,” he explained.
Gairdner also said that Twitter had been extremely useful to the website, as all of the journalists had accounts and had found news content via the site.
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