Holliston Reporter – Reader Survey – 2
Last fall, shortly after taking over the Holliston Reporter, we asked for your feedback helping us make the Reporter more valuable to you. Since that time, we’ve presented several new features attempting to address some of the information we received. Some of the changes include:
- School Lunch Menus – these are added on the first day of the month (or the last day if it falls on a weekend).
- Holliston Library Events – we’ve added the Library calendar to our website
- Obituaries – we now feature any obituaries we receive as a news item and the ones we receive are also accessible from the top menu.
- Community Calendar – we have updated the community calendar so any events we receive will be posted to the main menu (and are still accessible from the calendar on the front page)
Some of the other changes we’ve made in response to feedback include adding a drop down of categories onto the front page (along with the number of items posted in each). We have tried to address some of the things you asked for but some remain out of reach including:
Earlier this year, we entered into an agreement with Holliston Hub-HCAT and we’re including more of their content on our site.
- Police Logs – Holbrook is now handling dispatch duties for Holliston and we have been unable to reach an agreement regarding obtaining these records. Thanks to Paul Saulnier we’re adding some of the old police logs which are gaining lots of traction!
- Sports – thanks to dedicated writers, we’re publishing information about Holliston youth sports. If you are interested in contributing to this category, please do!
- School Committee – we have reached out to the school committee about providing us with more information about what is happening but so far we’ve been unable to successfully identify someone who is interested in doing meeting recaps.
On the backend, you can’t see the other changes we’ve made. One of the most significant was placing a counter on the dashboard of the site for administrators to see how many people we’re reaching on a daily basis as well as our most “popular” posts. While the popularity varies, we can report we’re averaging about 500 unique visitors daily — significantly fewer people than those who live in Holliston but also a significant increase from where we started in September (when readership was about 300 unique visitors a day). We want to keep that momentum up and towards that end, we’re once again asking for your help in making more improvements going forward. Please consider filling out this survey before May 31 and we’ll again take a look at your thoughts as we move forward.
3 Comments
Just to give a little more context behind the reporting on the School Committee. When Doreen took over the HR from the Cain’s (and as an aside has been doing an excellent job especially given limited resources), I reached out to her to see if she (or a delegate) could provide coverage of the School Committee meetings. We agreed that we would both try to find someone to cover the meetings, given her limited time, with a preference on an independent voice. An independent voice has not been found yet. I think having independent reporting is incredibly important as opposed to relying solely on Committee generated content. If you would be interested in covering the School Committee meetings, I would urge you to reach out to Doreen to discuss! In the meantime, we do send in our community communications and press releases to be published in the HR and will look to continue doing that. I believe strongly that good communication is good policy and we are always looking for ways to improve on that. Thank you! – Daniel Alfred, School Committee Chair (but speaking only for myself)
Perhaps an interesting stat may be how many readers are residents (or conversely how many ex-residents or out-of-towners keep informed of Holliston doings by reading The Reporter.
About 80 percent of the daily traffic is Holliston. Other active ones include FL, CA and Oregon!