Belfast Telegraph
Our digital offering is now the cornerstone of this mission. Our site leads the way for digital audiences in Northern Ireland with a mix of original premium journalism, breaking news, rolling coverage, analysis and comment, strong visuals and popular content. We reinvented our digital content strategy during the pandemic towards a sustainable business model, investing in and combining premium in-depth journalism that people want to pay for with stories that attract large audiences on search and social media. This strategic focus on quality regional journalism with audience engagement that delivers reach and traffic growth is unique in the digital Northern Ireland news landscape and the reason why, just over two years since the successful launch of our paywall, we are delivering traffic growth while close to 8,000 people are now subscribing for intelligent digital storytelling and unique and exclusive journalism from authors they want to read. KPIs include: •5% growth in pageviews in 2022 YTD (compared to the same period last year); •14M average monthly pageviews; •850k average weekly users; •12,000 subscriptions since January 1st 2021, including 7.8k customers in contract on October 31st, 2022. In the newsroom, our team of Audience Editors champion our users and make sure our stories are delivered to the right audience, at the right time, on the right platform. They focus on delivering strong presentation, curation and user experience across our main channels. The team leads a mobile-first approach and owns the post-publication activity, delivering homepage/app (+3% this year), social (+11%), search (+3%), newsletter (+10%), video (+4%), push notification and data visualisation strategies. The Belfast Telegraph’s outstanding digital coverage of the Assembly election in May 2022, which returned a historic result for Sinn Fein, is one of our highlights. Our agenda-setting exclusives during and after the campaign were all ‘digital first’. Our two-day coverage of the results included: •Live blogs with rolling updates from our reporters at every count centre •Visualisation of first preference votes and transfers for every candidate across 18 constituencies •Visualisation of live results at a Northern Ireland-wide level •Rolling social coverage with bespoke results cards •Constituency reports, at-a-glance shareable articles and in-depth analyses of what the results meant •Breaking push notifications and additional newsletters •Search optimisation strategy Our coverage delivered 1.8M pageviews over two days. Traffic in May 2022 was up 19% YoY and 20% MoM. Among other highlights were special week-long initiatives on Belfast and on the environment, our immersive mobile long-form project on the Queen in NI, and the production of high quality, impactful timeline videos to mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the Queen's death. Throughout the year we continued to innovate and evolve how we package and present our content to a mobile audience (particularly on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) and how we deliver the right mix of stories during a cost of living crisis.