The editorial director of Reach’s Live network of websites has described page views as “the best thing we’ve got right now” amid a drive to increase the number of stories they publish.
Paul Rowland wrote in an email to staff on 27 September that article volumes were being talked about “a lot in newsrooms at the moment” and blamed, in part, the volatility from previously huge traffic referrers like Google and Facebook.
A separate email, sent by Birmingham Live editor Graeme Brown last month, suggested journalists should file at least eight stories per day unless they were newsgathering outside of the office.
As first quoted by Hold The Front Page, Brown said: “We need to make more of shifts where people are not going out as drivers of volume. In practice, if you’re on a general shift and you’re not on a job, it should be at least eight stories a shift.”
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Press Gazette understands this can vary hugely depend on whether the role is court reporter or affiliate writer, for example.
However Brown has since revised the target to around five stories “on a normal reporting shift” with up to eight on a “live or weekend shift” in response to feedback from the newsroom, Press Gazette can reveal.
Brown wrote in a follow-up email on 2 October that he understood the concerns but “this is about better connecting you all with the issue. Page views are our currency and there was a time we were getting 50% of our traffic from Facebook – now it is more like 5%. We get a fraction of the PVs we used to from, say, a local murder and this is the most plausible way I can see to address that.”
He continued: “We’ll be expecting more volume and are more likely to be focusing on a higher number of quick turnaround stories. On a live or weekend shift we might expect a reporter to produce closer to eight stories, whereas on a normal reporting shift it might be closer to five.
“It’s not an absolute – if you want to write something you think is brilliant and demands a whole day, talk to your manager who can adjudicate. In general, we need to be managing time efficiently.”
Reach editorial director’s email to staff about importance of page views
Rowland’s email sought to explain why page views are still key to Reach even as other publishers focus more on loyalty and engagement metrics.
Rowland said: “Ultimately, this is all about building sustainable newsrooms, and in the here and now that means making sure we’re driving enough page views to fund our journalism.
“Going forward, there’s a lot of working happening to diversify our revenue streams – be it through affiliates, social video, podcasts, e-commerce or other routes that haven’t even emerged yet – but in the meantime we need to make sure we’re bringing in the funds that will support the business to continue developing and transforming the way we engage readers as the digital media landscape changes.
“The way we do that right now is through page views. It may not be a perfect metric, but as a directly monetisable digital unit, it’s the best thing we’ve got right now. And at the risk of reducing journalism to pure maths, the page views we generate are a compound of the number of articles we produce, and the number of times that each one is read.
“That might seem like a complete statement of the obvious, but it’s an important thing to confront when we think about the things that we need to do to fund our journalism. To increase page views, we need to increase either the number of articles we produce, or the number of people who read each one (or both).
“Given the volatility we’ve seen in recent months (and years) with the big referrers, it’s hard to put any certainty around our ability to consistently increase the average number of page views each article gets.
“That’s not to say there aren’t actions we can take to influence this positively – choosing topics and formats that are optimised for a specific referrer is one route. Fostering communities of readers around events and issues so that we’ve got a captive audience hanging on our updates is another. But the constant jeopardy of the environment we operate in is that the benefit of that good work can potentially be overwhelmed by a sudden and violent downturn on one or more referrer.
“We talk about volume a lot because it’s the one variable that’s entirely within our control. But please don’t misunderstand that as me implying that it’s easy to control. It’s not. I know how much hard work is going into increasing our volume levels to where they are at the moment.
“But here’s the even harder bit – volume for volume’s sake will get us nowhere. We need to find the ways to create more opportunities for audiences to discover our content in areas where we can compete and win, and we need to do it without sacrificing the reasons our local brands exist. It’s really tough. But it’s not impossible.”
Rowland added that Reach sites frequently cover major breaking news events in which “every possible crumb of audience interest has been spun out into a breakout that finds readers by doing every angle, for every platform. That’s not about us ticking a volume box; it’s about providing the most comprehensive service to readers coming directly to us, and giving ourselves the best chance of more casual readers browsing for information landing with us (and hopefully returning).
“So yes, we need to publish at scale on the populist topics that can help us bring in the big numbers from Discover – the things you’ll routinely see topping Chartbeat – but we also need to generate that scale around the topics that our most loyal readers turn to us repeatedly for.”
In its half-year results published in July, Reach revealed page views were down 25% compared to H1 2023 due to the “ongoing impact of 2023’s referrer deprioritisation of news”. But it added: “Trends are improving and open market prices for mass scale programmatic advertising have stabilised.”
Data-driven revenues, which are based around Reach’s own audience data, affiliates, partnerships and e-commerce rather than programmatic advertising, now make up 45% of all digital revenues. However in the first half of 2024, print still made up 77% of the company’s total revenues.
[Read more: Reach reports first digital revenue growth since 2022]
In response to a Press Gazette post on X about the article target, many users shared concerns for the journalists involved.
Journalist Olivia Devereux-Evans said: “As someone who has done this… a 7-3pm shift means writing at least a story an hour, sometimes more. Sometimes I didn’t take a proper lunch break as I felt pressure to hit 8 stories and was consistently stressed about page views…”
Similarly Louis Staples said: “As someone who used to work in clickbait content farming: this puts reporters at professional and personal risk. It burns them out and leads to mistakes and a loss confidence, not to mention questionable ethical judgements in pursuit of traffic. End this model!”
Many of the comments also focused on the user experience on Reach’s websites which can be slow to load and hard to read due to ad clutter.
Sharing a screenshot of the Cambridgeshire Live website featuring a pop-up asking for permission to send notifications alongside advertising, journalist Alex Goy said: “And this is how those stories will be presented. The problem ain’t the volume, chums, it’s that you can barely read them.”
Another X user said: “It’s 2024. First of all Reach need to design basic news sites that work then we might actually use them. The awfulness of regional news sites means people ignore them. End of chat.”
Last week chief executive Jim Mullen told a Press Gazette event that users should see a “gradual reduction” in the number of adverts on Reach websites over the next few years because of the end to a longstanding pension fund deficit and the end of phone-hacking litigation.
Mullen said these financial obligations have meant “we need to put a certain amount of ads on our pages.
“All that money is paid off in 2028 so we should see a gradual reduction. We’ve already launched a new platform which has managed the latency of it, which is on some of the regional titles, the Liverpool Echo, you will notice a difference, but over the last couple of years, it was pretty packed, and that is gradually getting better now…”
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