I’ve been worried lately about our readership numbers, which have fallen off a cliff since the election. Since I also put the flexible paywall back up at about the same time, I wasn’t sure if the drop was caused by the paywall or by a natural decline during the holidays. (And let’s face, who isn’t tired of dealing with the news?)
This morning, I got some reassurance that it isn’t just Forward Kentucky.
Now this is a little geeky, but stay with me. There is a web thing called Real Simple Syndication (RSS). Once it is set up on a web site, it automatically generates a title, except, and link for every story that is posted. (If you want to see ours, go to ForwardKY.com/feed.) RSS readers can then take this “feed” and turn it into a list of stories.
Every morning, I use my RSS reader to scan hundreds of news stories from news sources across the state, looking for items for the Forward Five and possible stories for the web site. The reader I use also tracks how many people have clicked through a story to the original story on the original site. And that’s where I got my reassurance.
Before the election, it was not uncommon for a story on the Courier-Journal, say, to have hundreds or even thousands of click-throughs. Pretty much every political story from all the major outlets was like that. But I noticed this morning that the numbers for other outlets were WAY down. Instead of hundreds, it was 55, or 30, or even zero.
So, I’m glad to find out that it’s not just us. (“Was it something I said?”) People are turning their attention to the holidays, and family, and snow, and all the normal things we think about at this time of year.
I will note, though, that these are not normal times, and even though it can be a downer, we need to keep paying attention to what is happening. Exhaustion is a tool of autocrats, as is chaos. Don’t let it cause you to give up or stop watching.
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