Voice of Real Australia is a regular newsletter from Australian Community Media, which has journalists in every state and territory. Sign up here to get it by email, or here to forward it to a friend. Today's newsletter is written by Australian Community Media's Head of Audience, Gayle Tomlinson.
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Dear Voice of Real Australia readers, I want to give you a glimpse behind the curtain of this newsletter.
(There is a small ask at the end. If you don't want to read that far then you can skip ahead and we ask you fill out this survey here.)
Those of you that have been with us since the beginning will know we launched this newsletter (which we affectionately call Vora) with an aim of covering the May 2019 Federal Election from a regional perspective. We wanted to fill the gap no-one else was filling.
We were overwhelmed by how engaged our audience was and after surveying you, our readers, we decided to keep going. And so far you've stuck with us and we've grown. Thank you.
We have 27 journalists across every state and territory contributing to Vora each month and to be honest it's a labour of love for all of us. Each morning our newsletter producer Mitch Vleeskens juggles his regular duties with pulling together the newsletter.
Our group news editor Janine Graham scours our sites for the best stories to curate the More Stuff list and executive editor James Joyce or myself will tear ourselves away from our endless meetings to cast an eye over it all before we press send.
Some days we're all busier than others and if you don't get your Vora in your inbox until after 1pm, you now know it's because we're all waiting for James ...
Why am I telling you this? Well, I've just spent a few hours pulling apart our Vora statistics and it has told me that our daily struggle to get Vora in front of you, is absolutely worth it.
With every newsletter we send we can see what content our readers are responding to and where you are spending your time. Scary, I know!
Going into the stats I had thought I'd see stories about politics or articles from the Canberra Times topping our list of top content.
I thought perhaps you might be skipping the 'More News' section. I really didn't think ANYONE was getting right to the bottom. I was wrong on all fronts.
This is what are statistics are telling us.
Our Vora readers love a great yarn, particularly if it's unusual human interest piece that may have a bit of crime or fraud thrown in. Climate change and Barnaby Joyce also rate well and health and property are solid performers.
You enjoy reading content from all parts of Australia. As long as it's a great story it doesn't matter where it came from. (This really is a surprise to us. Remember we're used to serving local audiences in very specific geographic locations).
You love the 'More Stuff' section. In fact in the last month the vast majority of our top clicked stories came from 'More Stuff'. (Good work Janine!)
You really like to have a good read on a Sunday. We can see you are devouring every headline.
You spend more than four minutes reading the Vora email and in doing so you click around five links a time. Anyone who works in publishing will know that these figures are astonishingly good.
And you absolutely read every last word to the end. This makes us very happy.
So, what does all this mean? Well, the good news is Vora will continue to arrive in your inbox around 11am (ish) each day.
But we'd really like to learn more about our Vora readers to make sure we are truly giving you what you need. The clicks tell us about reader habits but they don't tell us about where you live, why you support Vora, what else we could be doing, what other gaps could we be filling? This information helps us to understand you better and to choose our content better.
So, we ask you to fill out this quick survey. Tell us how we can improve and give us the inspiration to make your Vora the best newsletter in your inbox every day.
You've done that bit? Thanks. Now we ask you to keep Janine happy and click every 'More Stuff' link below.
Thanks and keep reading.
Gayle Tomlinson
ACM Head of Audience