Story selection vindicated
Publishing a newspaper isn’t rocket science; it’s common sense really. The influence of an editor is most noticeable in story selection and the emphasis given to particular stories.
While changes to the style and direction of a newspaper might affect sales in the longer term, casual buyers are won by word of mouth and a strong front page.
In my experience about 90 percent of newspaper buyers are regular, probably a bit more than than. A good front page or a special feature might swing five percent in extra sales.
Most of my decisions are instinctive and I actually find it hard to describe the process because there isn’t one.
I simply choose what I think will be the most interesting story/photo to the greatest number of people.
Quite often that will be something quirky; it generally isn’t political.
I just went through a monthly exercise today where we look at the individual circulation figures for each paper we produced in the previous month.
The biggest selling edition had a front page headline “Unsafe text”. The story was local people commenting on a national survey about mobile phone users reading their partners’ text messages.
Significantly, most of the people interviewed were under the age of 21 … the population segment least in tune with newspapers.
There were some raised eyebrows around the office when I placed that story (with a photo) on the front page.
It sold 500 papers more (about six percent) than our weakest selling Friday edition, which was a cover dedicated to a national league soccer match in Mount Gambier.
I'm a 41-year-old father of four working as a newspaper editor at Mount Gambier in South Australia.
