Promotion is key

Yesterday I visited again with Sara Kauk from Design Missoula about redesigning The Madisonian website. The whole redesign  is really centered around how to make the website look better and get more traffic. Generating web traffic is a frustrating task. It's so important and expectations get lofty. We know we can do better on www.madisoniannews.com and we're sure we can do far better with outpostevents.net.

Solutions seem to be varied and everyone has good ideas. The problem for small newspapers like ours is figuring out how to create the time to dedicate to website development and promotion. And better than SEO optimization, or keyword manipulation is direct promotion. A case in point - a few weeks back wildfires popped around Madison County and we were in a breaking news/blogging situation. I posted updates frequently on our facebook site and then tracked the analytics on the homepage. I didn't see much of a bump. So I sent out a mass email to about 90 people. Bang. We were over 1,000 page views by the day's end - the most we'd seen ever. The other thing that seems to get a bump in traffic is other people helping with promotion. If a friend and the local chamber of commerce sends around a link to a story on our website, we see a positive uptick in traffic.

So now we're trying to take that lesson in promotion and recreating it again and again.

Navigating land mines

This week we've shut down Letters to the Editor and advertising pertaining to the upcoming school board election in Ennis, with the exception of responses to last week's letters from the candidates themselves. The idea is to try and be fair to the candidates and the election process and not allow someone to make final jabs or outlandish claims right before the election. I think it's a fair way to do it, but the problem is it leaves a lot of gray area, which leads to questions and differing opinions.

I'm not the greatest at dealing with conflict, but ultimately I'm the one responsible for what is in the newspaper and the policies we put in place. That's hard for people to understand sometimes, particularly when I tell them I won't run their letter. But, in a way it's good that people have a hard time with it, because it means they see the value in The Madisonian. The community feels an investment in the newspaper and the way it's written and how issues are portrayed. They should feel passionate about the opinion page and the letters people write.

Like many contentious issues, this school board thing in Ennis has shown us just how messy and complicated dealing with public issues can be in a small community. But experience tells me there will be some good things that come out of this. I'll keep looking.

Evolution

Part of running a newspaper these days is figuring out how to have the best printed newspaper and an effective, relevant and dynamic website. The goal is not only to get the news out quickly, but to also be an attractive option for advertisers. The business model seems to be changing, but just how is still a bit nebulous.

However, one person that's helping me and The Madisonian work through this stuff is Sara Kauk at Design Missoula. She just explained landing pages to me, which took some doing. I didn't realize I had gotten so old and out of touch, but really the concept is basically like special editions for your newspaper. Now it's just a website. Thanks Sara!

Getting back to it ... a reintroduction of sorts

I've been away from this blog for so long that it seems almost pointless to retrace my steps between my last post and now. Initially I launched this blog to help promote my book "Blue Man in a Red State: Montana's Governor Brian Schweitzer and New Western Populism." It was published in 2008 as Schweitzer was making his run for a second term. He won that election and is now in the last six months offfice. The book? It was pulled from the shelf last year. So if you were lucky enough to get a copy, hold on to it. Could be a collector's item one of these days. If you didn't get a copy ... believe it or not I still have a few and we can work a deal.

I'm the editor/publisher of the oldest continually published weekly newspaper in Montana – The Madisonian. It started printing in 1873 and, God willing, will keep going for another 61 years and longer. I've been in Ennis three years and can say that heading up a newspaper vital to a growing community is challenging, rewarding, frustrating and exhilarating all at the same time.

Today I'm preparing for Monday's Ennis School Board candidate forum. Part of our obligation as a publication is to inform our readers and local citizens and that's what I'm trying to do with this forum. However, it's always a challenge to coordinate and emcee these sorts of things. The controversy surrounding the race this year is going to make it more so. It should be interesting.

The forum will be Monday April 23 at 7 p.m. at the Ennis Schools. We initially planned to have it in the new multi-purpose room, but it might be moved to the gym. Stay tuned.

Missoula Independent piece

The Missoula Independent  published a review of the book today. Here's a short piece of it:

Drinking coffee at a small table in the River Rising bistro in downtown Hamilton, Lemon is as about as far from Helena or Washington, D.C., as could be, and he likes it that way. The former environmental and outdoor reporter for the Ravalli Republic and current politics editor at NewWest.net, describes himself as an “a-political” writer. He seems more content keeping up with sports scores and fly-fishing the Bitterroot than tapping into the nation’s political pulse.  

“I had to become a political junkie,” Lemon says. “By the end of writing the book, I had to follow politics like I follow sports. Every morning instead of clicking on ESPN, I clicked on Real Clear Politics or the Huffington Post, going through all the daily headlines."

:Note the reading at Fact & Fiction on Campus July 9 is at 2 p.m. The reading at Chapter One in Hamilton is at 7 p.m. the same day.