Newspapers (courtesy The Nationals)
There’ve been a lot of stories this week.
President Trump telling Europeans they’re loosers. President Trump telling NATO it should shoot down Russian jets. President Trump insisting the climate isn’t changing.
I guess that’s news.
But it was another piece of information that caught my eye, because it says much more about how the world is changing. The Press Gazette’s regular analysis of the top 50 English-language news sites in the world found that Year-on-Year traffic growth had collapsed for 49 of them.
The only site to increase readership was Substack. But to journalists, that really isn’t a news site: instead, it’s a collection of blogs. Good, but not editorially driven. It doesn’t begin with the aim of describing what’s happening in the world to its audience - it does that as a by-product of presenting people’s thoughts.
The two Australian sites in the world’s top 50 are the ABC (coming in at number 36, down 4% to 66.4 million readers each week) and news.com.au (39, down 9% to 60.1 million visitors).
The point about this is that people still need information, but they can very easily either take or leave the sort of stories being dished up by mainstream news outlets.
These might be interesting, or even diverting, but the point is they’re not stories people feel they need to know.
And that’s the difference with abilityNEWS. When we start back up again we’ll be aming to have a more complete coverage of the things you need to know.
They’ll still be well told, of course, and interesting (we hope). But the real point is they won’t be just to divert you, they will be about the actions, events and people that are defining the disability community. They will be real stories about what’s happening around us, keeping you up to date on what you need to know.
So that’s why we’re not worried about the plunge in circulation. We’re confident that we will provide the information you require. That’s why we believe in our future.
And that’s why I’ve got to get back to work . . . so we can begin publishing again!
Best,
Nic Stuart (editor)