Digital Journal role evolves as Sunday paper ends
Relinked is a feature that recaps some of the most interesting developments online at edmontonjournal.com. The column appears Mondays. It’s no surprise that the Journal is going through some changes these days. Last Monday’s announcement that the paper will be dropping to a six-day publishing cycle (among other changes, but this was the biggest) was met with a ton of confusion and consternation from our readers. Which is understandable; since 1982 we’ve been publishing seven days a week. It’s a rather significant change.
This column focuses on developments at the website; since edmontonjournal.com will continue to update on Sundays, it could be argued that this doesn’t mean too much of a change, digitally.
As the print Journal evolves, however, the responsibility falls on the digital Journal to evolve as well. Not to replace the print product; rather, to fill the sizable niche left by a day without a print Journal but still with the same strong, unflagging journalism we will continue to pursue. So in that regard, the website (and the supplementary media channels of the Journal) must take on a larger responsibility than ever.
This past week, we’ve kept the lines of communication as open as possible. Editorin-chief Lucinda Chodan and publisher John Connolly took to the web on Monday to answer a flood of questions from concerned readers. We heard about the great love that people have for several Sunday features – the Insight and books sections, the Times crossword puzzle, even TV Times, which is another casualty of the publishing changes – and this is an excellent development. We’re tailoring our responses and figuring out what from the Sunday print editions can be preserved in other papers. The feedback has been overwhelming, but in a good way.
Please don’t think that because the announcement has been made, the conversation is over. The decisions on how the Journal will best move forward are still not in a fully formed state, and we not only encourage feedback and further deliberation but will be using the digital channels to keep you, the readers, informed every step of the way.
The Journal can work without a Sunday edition; we’ve done it before. What we, as a media organization, cannot function without is the readership and the audience we cater to daily, however you ultimately choose to interact with us.
You can reach us by commenting on the web version of this story, visiting our Facebook page or customer service Twitter feed, or as always, at our Reader Response Line at (780) 429-5225.
OTHER STORIES
Strangely, we can’t call the in-paper publication announcements the biggest story of the week. “Ross Sheppard teacher kicked out of class for giving students zeros” (May 31) exploded all over the Edmonton webspace midweek, starting with a simple twoparagraph blog-and-poll from David Staples (that has since been shared on Facebook more than 2,600 times) and eventually spawning Friday’s A1 story for the paper. The aforementioned Andrea Sands article far-outstripped all other stories on the website that day, with three times the traffic of the second-place story (and remember, this was in a week with a shooting at Stettler and a bizarre porn star/body parts/politics scandal) while Staples’s blog post eventually became a column interviewing suspended physics teacher Lynden Dorval.
And then that night, we became tangential to a second explosive web campaign: a story by Brent Wittmeier, “Pedestrian in hospital after north Edmonton crash” (May 31), was linked to in a public Facebook post by the pedestrian’s husband. This second post went viral again, with the enclosed link generating more than 28,000 page views in a single day on canada.com. Ninety per cent of the traffic to the story was redirected from Facebook; in contrast, most stories hover between five and 10 per cent.
It’s a powerful reminder that the Journal’s product may be evolving in the coming months, but our commitment to local, talkative, intelligent journalism never plans to flag, nor will our responses as we evolve to reader critiques and commentary: following and responding to the trending discussions of the day as often as we are breaking them.