Two Bits – 7 February 2014

Have you ever heard of Vanuatu?
The name rang a vague bell but I must confess I had to fall back on Google to make sure. Yep, it’s a teeny-weeny little group of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 1750 miles east of Australia and about as far as you can get from anywhere on the planet.
And why should the name even come up? Well, we have a reader of the North Coast Courier on Vanuatu. More about this later.
We first developed a website for the Courier in 2007, when everyone was experimenting with getting online. It was a contact point for anyone looking online for us, carrying that week’s paper and an archive of published articles.
Last year, together with our partner, Caxton publishers, we decided to get serious and developed a site that would be responsive to providing more immediate news. Our readers and followers at that stage – numbering in the hundreds – were mostly out-of-towners, people who couldn’t get their hands on a copy of the paper. So most of them were from Gauteng and former North Coasters who’d emigrated to the UK, USA or Oz.
First challenge was to change that, to attract an immediate and interactive audience within our distribution area, which is from Umdloti to Mandeni. A lot of people have computers, laptops and iPads, but even more have cellphones. How do you reach that market effectively? And more importantly, how do you carry news on your website without detracting from your published newspaper?
These are not new questions; the newspaper industry worldwide has been agonising over them  for a decade or more. So when we started down this path, the first decision was to make way for the youngsters!
The Courier is fortunate in having a young and adventurous news-gathering team of reporters, for whom mobile phones are like a third hand. So as they go out on their jobs every day and come across an event which needs to be communicated immediately – like an accident or a fire – they can do so very quickly with their phones. They can take photos or even videos and have them online in a matter of minutes.
Taking a few steps back, we have always told our advertisers that the more interest they take in their newspaper advertising, the more successful it will be. In other words, varying their advert in wording, shape or colour frequently, catches the passing eye better than a static notice. Well the same is true online. The way to keep visitors coming back to your website is to keep refreshing it with new information. But it takes hard work, make no mistake. Constant eye on the ball. One learns too, to use platforms like Facebook and Blackberry messaging and to forge partnerships with others who are already online and want to expand their presence.
In January we had more than 20 000 visits to the North Coast Courier site and the more interest it attracts, the faster it grows.
Now that we have a constant, measurable audience of some weight, we are ready for the next step in the process, that of selling advertising spots to businesses. Recently the UK’s Johnson publishing group said they had managed to regain in online ad sales the revenue they had lost to the internet from their paper publications, and that is also our aim.
And the Courier newspaper, I may tell you, is doing just fine as well. From this week we increase our print order to 35 000 copies a week (up from 33 000) to cater for the steadily growing population, maintaining our position as the largest and best-read local newspaper on the Dolphin Coast.
But, before I forget, what of Vanuatu? Well, this is but one of the strange places where we have online readers. By far the majority are from SA, the UK, America and Australia, but last month the Courier was read online from an astonishing 104 countries! I know this because of a tool called Google Analytics, which tells me not only which country readers were from, but which page and even which story they were reading. While it is interesting that we had readers from El Salvador and the British Virgin Islands, what I find it extraordinary is that there were 508 readers from Kenya and 489 from Nigeria!
* * *
Some people hear voices. Some see invisible people. Others have no imagination whatsoever.