BayBuzz mounted a strenuous effort to cover the just-concluded local body elections.
Since the 1st of July (the month official nominations had to be filed) our website has had nearly 165,000 page views, about 55,000 per month, most of those focused on our election coverage.
Over that window, BayBuzz published 72 articles of our own on the candidates, their positions and the issues being contested. Every weekend we pushed our coverage out via email newsletter to about 5,000 readers, but these accounted for less than 20% of our total website visitors. People were watching!
Apart from BayBuzz reporting, we invited all candidates to post their campaign views and messages on our website at no charge – over 100 did so and for many of them that was their only exposure to a wide audience.
All of this on our Election Central web pages.
Unprecedented and unmatched campaign coverage … and I’ll bet many of you are ready to move on!
But before you do, of course we will be providing our analysis of the results and their implications. More of that next week.
And then we’ll be returning to a more ‘normal’ assortment of BayBuzz coverage of the Bay.
So stay tuned!
P.S. Our coverage wasn’t done with magic wands! Can you help?
Very impressive Tom many thanks for the comprehensive coverage- but it’s very disappointing about the Maori ward vote I really thought more people would be better informed and therefore supportive.
Thanks Tom. Appreciated the considerable effort your team has put in with your election coverage
Thank you Tom and team for providing excellent coverage of the elections and giving candidates a platform to speak.
Ditto Kay Buzzard. Very disappointed with Maori ward vote!
Thanks for this initiative and no doubt big effort to make it happen. I used it to make better informed choices.