Above: Illustration by denisismagilov/DepositPhotos

About this report.

On January 01, 2018, the first report to readers on the publishing year 2017 was offered as an accounting to its primary stakeholders about what had been done during the year and the results it had produced.

To my mind, the readers of TechNewsTT invest time in reading the journalism we produce and it has been clear that there is a dedicated core of repeat readers who constitute the base on which the project was founded and continues to grow.
Reports for 2018 and 2019 are also available.

The numbers

This was the year that digital moved to the front of the public mind, and it also became the best year for readership on TechNewsTT.
So before going on to anything else, let me say thank you for that.
Before 2020, our best year was 2016 when the site attracted 59,494 post views.
At this writing, 2020 registered 77,573 post views compared to a total of 52,448 in 2019.

There is a difference in post tally between the WordPress and Google Analytics statistics (Google reports 87,015 page views), but Ive always done comparisons based on the history of the site’s statistics record as tallied by WordPress, so I’ll stick with the lower number.
Google’s analytics are, however, more fine-grained, often painfully so, and I will reference some of the interesting statistics that it offers.

The big stories

The biggest stories were the ones that translated into direct personal impact, and the top stories were our reporting and commentary that raised concerns about the state of TSTT, followed by an exclusive report on a fintech pilot project in Point Fortin. Yeah, we went, got lost and then found the Mayor’s office eventually.

Letters to the Prime Minister and Education Minister and a report on the ANSA McAl ransomware hack were the four leading stories for 2020, pointing to a value proposition in speaking truth bluntly to power and breaking down complex technology issues for the general public.

Exclusive stories were introduced in 2020, though with the impact of Covid-19 causing problems for all local journalism enterprises, we made a decision to work more closely and in deeper partnership with Newsday, our print publisher of first record.

While our report on the ANSA McAl security incident broke the story, we shared information and reporting with Newday on their subsequent reporting to our mutual benefit.
It’s worth noting that some general interest posts continue to deliver views, going all the way back to 2016.

Advertising and sponsored posts

In 2020, a decision was made to explore programmatic advertising using a WordPress service that allowed for more relevant filtering of advertisement content.

That proved to be an informative bust. When the service was disconnected a week ago, the service had earned, in our best year for post views, the sum of US$4.77.

While the site makes no money and has enjoyed some limited support from clients interested in placing sponsored posts, those inches of space given over to advertising seemed better used otherwise.

The challenge on that front is considerable. To make money off programmatic advertising, a site needs a level of views that superniche news reporting (Technology > Caribbean > Trinidad and Tobago) cannot generate at a level that makes it worth the effort.

So revenue remains a challenge, and the next effort will be on finding a value model that might encourage financial reader support for the journalism being done on TechNewsTT.

Site redesign

Sharp-eyed readers will have noted that the site was redesigned in early December. The theme used to style the site was in use for more than five years and wasnt getting updated.

The original developer had sold the business, and interest in the news and magazine segment had disappeared. Getting around the dated feature set was handled for years with several plug-ins (software that extends the base capabilities of WordPress) that added more modern features, enabling Google font management, more modern post blurb boxes on the home page and minor but useful features like estimates of reading time.

Some key plug-ins were on an annual license and it seemed right to explore a more modern theme with features appropriate to a news website.

Many themes developed for such use are built around so-called “builder” themes. I worked with three such themes to assist colleagues that I support in their web development efforts but found them sluggish, tending to produce bloated code that slowed down websites for readers.

There is also no commonality to the way they function. Learning one builder does not translate into any advantage when working with one of its rivals in the business.

Meanwhile, WordPress had moved on to Gutenberg, a block-based system for designing that was part of the code for the publishing platform.

TechNewsTT began working with Gutenberg soon after its introduction and while it was shaky at first, developers began producing interesting block plug-ins that dramatically improved the design capabilities of the new page design system.
InHype from Magnium Themes replaced Designwall’s Focus, chosen because of its deep support for Gutenberg and design options that allowed some migration of the design cues established for TechNewsTT.

If you haven’t noticed any change, then we’ve been wildly successful. Along the way, it became possible to remove five plug-ins from our back-end because the new theme implemented those services natively.

An emphasis on mobile

In choosing the new theme and making updated design choices, an emphasis on mobile was key.
Mobile devices account for 68 percent of views on the website and are overwhelmingly the primary contact point for first time visitors, totalling 83.9 percent of first time views.

While I have been long attached to the real estate and design opportunities afforded by a full-page view on a desktop browser that isn’t the reality for most readers of the website.

The sidebar was dispensed with, in favour of a more streamlined first two screens of content. By default, some design cues are suppressed on mobile browsers that support Google’s AMP, which ensures faster load times on mobile data, though some design elements are sacrificed.

Viewers that scroll through the story will find additional references and links at the end of the page along with an option to load a less stripped down version of the page.

Engagement

Patterns of engagement with TechNewsTT continue to evolve.
In 2020 the leading sources of readers were organic search (38.4 percent) and direct links (31.3 percent). Social media sources accounted for 21.5 percent. Linked-In has emerged as a source of animated discussions and engagement on issues that strike a chord with the professional IT community.

Covid-19 related distractions killed any opportunity to implement a revised email strategy, and the poor return on an effort built on automated MailChimp harvesting of new posts is understandable.
It remains unclear whether there is a local appetite for email based notifications of new posts, even on a weekly basis. That bears further exploration

The right news for readers

Among the surprises that reporting during Covid-19 brought was the challenge of matching reporting to reader needs.

One post, which sought to solve a widespread problem that local teachers faced with bad pictures of schoolwork submitted for marking’ didnt get anywhere near the traction Id h’oped for, though it did get retweets from readers in first world nations.
Some issues were widespread enough that the posts sold themselves.

In other cases, the reporting seemed to have come too early and gained traction when the news was resurfaced weeks and even months later after the problems or issues became more widespread.
At one point I half-jokingly considered changing the tagline of TechNewsTT to “local tech news from the future,” but that’s a pretty hard line to sustain. Also, it seemed like something out of Tenet.

And that’s puzzling enough.