Third week in and I am now very aware as to my responsibilties as Managing Editor. First thing, Monday morning, Cat and I went over the bulletin together to prepare for her debrief to everyone in the newsroom. We went over the notes from my blog, which I had written the night before so we left no stones unturned and all problems with the bulletin were noted to give the best possible feedback.
As far as directing people to the site goes, this week's progress is worth taking note. I sent endless emails to valued websites who could link us to sites, which in turn will increase our traffic through the accumulation of more back links. As well as sending many emails, I also added an an event to the Winchester City Council website so that anyone visiting the site will see our website advertised (winchester.gov.uk). In addition to this, I requested advertising at the Discovery Centre in Winchester.
For the first time I published our statistics for www.winol.co.uk. The statitics were accompanied by a detailed analysis as to where we are at the moment as far as traffic stats and page rank etcetera, and also what we now need to do to improve the number of hits and unique users we receive. From the analysis of lasts year's Winol and that of the previous week, it was blantantly obvious that most of our traffic was coming from people visiting our competitions, so it was clear that we needed a big drive in competiton promotion for this week (my area); I decided we needed double the amount of flyers than the previous week. The analysis of statistics led to me making a new blog - on Chris's requests - that would detail all of my notes, which I thought would be of use to everyone on the course (www.winolinformation.blogspot.com).
At the editor's meeting I had to stand in for Kayleigh, which meant I had to take notes and discuss the strength of the stories, with the other editors, that the reporters had offered earlier that day. This was simple but good experience for me for the future when I have to stand in for others again. After this, I made my usual notes on the temporary running orders, which would be put on the wall and made available to people (who wanted them) in the newsroom.
After discussing the issue of promotion with Brian, we decided that radio could be a good path to go down. Most local radio stations didn't get back to me, however I got in contact with South Today (ambitious, I know) and they suggested that Winol could try and get some promotion on BBC Radio Solent. They suggested that I could try and get on the Nick Girdler programme to talk about Winol - this an area I am definitely going persue in the next few weeks. Local Radio would be a great way to promote us as people respect the honesty of radio, and if we could get someone on from Winol, our traffic would easily double.
Other Managing Editor responsibilties I had to do this week included: helping to write the competititon script, making all hard-copy advertisment and leaflets, intervene in disputes between one of the section managers and one of their writers, keep the news room tidy and equipped with essentials (i.e. newspapers and paper for the printer), emailing Keith to put the word out on Wednesday, and run and edit the autocue script.
The achievement I am most pleased with this week is an email I received on Friday from Ian Murray (Editor of the Daily Echo). As with many other publications, I had asked if we could promote ourselves via there publications and establish links with their sites, and Ian had got back to me and said that there would be a posssibilty of Winol working with the Daily Echo and that we should come to the Daily Echo to discuss working with their paper.
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