Marketing and Audience Engagement

Viewership of our website during my time as Editor-in-Chief.

The Newtonite

During my time as Editor-in-Chief, I was in-charge of overseeing our business department. We massively increased our advertisement sales and raised a lot of money. As a student-run paper, we are entirely self-funded, meaning that without these ad sales, we wouldn't be able to operate. We raised enough money to provide scholarships for our trip to the CSPA conference. We tried new strategies to attract businesses to buy an ad in our paper, including building relationships with managers and holding ad parties, during which every member of the paper calls as many local businesses as possible.

A key element to our increase in ad sales was an increase in viewership. We built up our website to have the most relevant, audience retaining stories be the first a readers sees. We also utilized social media to publicize our stories, gaining many followers and leading to a notable increase in readership.

Another element was adding more interactive elements to our print specials. We added crosswords, scavenger hunts, and more eye-grabbing graphics to the paper, encouraging more students to open our paper and stick with at least a few pages.

Viewer Retention

I have learned how to attract the most eyes, both when doing broadcast and print, simply by trial and error. One of the key lessons I have learned is that students enjoy watching and hearing from other students, especially ones they know. This has taught me that the best way to encourage someone to read or watch my content is to feature people and perspectives that they can relate to. I began to analyze who and what we feature, both at The Newtonite and NNTV. I found that often certain students were popping up over and over again in our coverage. This made sense, as certain students stand out or are more involved in the school and community. However, I realized that if we only cover the same students, it would be difficult to attract more people to pay attention to our coverage. This encouraged me to try to include a wide variety of students, from all grades and backgrounds, and seek out lesser told stories that don't always grab our headlines.

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