Why do we want to analyse reader numbers and where those article visits are from?
Well, let’s start with reader numbers
At the Bylines Network, we currently have 10 citizen journalism publications with articles written by volunteers – citizens like you writing about what they care about. We want to make sure that they get visibility on what they write. Given they put in all that work writing – and then we at Bylines Network do all our work editing, finding lead pictures, publishing, and promoting on social media – for the articles to go nowhere in the interwebs would be a total waste. We want to ensure all our pieces are getting fair visibility (remember, we publish these articles for public good, not for profit) so this is a basic health check on our publishing. Also, as we grow, we want to be able to see the numbers coming in as it’s important motivation for our team. Furthermore, it helps us see what topics get the most interest. We find all kinds of interesting things – like our readers’ appetite for writing about local British railway lines and local infrastructure is huge!
Where from? Part 1: locations
The Bylines Network is comprised of regional & devolved nation publications. But articles in say Yorkshire Bylines are not just about Yorkshire. Remember that this is citizen journalism, so Yorkshire Bylines is the voice of Yorkshire residents on matters local, regional, national and international. When we publish local news, we generally see it read locally and when we share national or international articles, we generally see them read more geographically widely. However, *some* local issues get read all over the UK, despite being Yorkshire-based and that indicates to us that the issue is relevant everywhere and perhaps we also need to cover similar issues in the North East, North West, Midlands, Kent, etc. Also, when we launched Bylines Scotland, we found a persistent significant chuck of readership in western USA – which actually maps onto where the Scottish diaspora settled in America. How cool is that?
Where from? Part 2: sources
At the Bylines Network, we proactively share and push our content across various social media platforms. We also regularly come up on the first page of Google and other searches as a news source. Where should we be putting our effort to get maximum visibility of those citizen journalism articles? In 2024/5 we saw huge drop-off in traffic coming from X and a big surge in our readership via Bluesky. So for that reason (alongside the ethics) we basically dropped X and switched focus to posting to, and engaging with, our community on Bluesky.
So these are the reasons we collect and watch the data. We’re not interested in anything personalised or for profit – we just want to understand where our community/audience are for the citizen journalism articles we produce. The only time we publish those data is in our public annual report which you can see here, if you’re curious.
And if you’ve read all of this, we hope you like what we do and would consider writing for us or becoming a friend of the Bylines Network. Thank you!