Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

The Indy by the Numbers
Next week we will post our 8,000th article, since we published our first story on March 26, 2019. At this moment we are at 7987. Those articles have been authored by 505 unique writers and have received 10,221 published comments. We have 1548 subscribers to our weekly email dispatch (drop us a note at amherstindy@gmail.com if you’d like to be added to that list), though it’s clear that most readers access the Indy via our webpage. In June, we changed the way we track readership, and we now count only “engaged page views,” meaning unique visits that result in opening an article or a menu. Since then, we’ve been holding steady at about 7,000 engaged page views/week, which we think is pretty good for the summer, when our readership tends to be the lowest. You can check out our analytics in our table of contents, “What’s in This Issue“, to find out which articles have received the most attention.

Our Other Sources
We supplement our local reporting with content from 17 different publications that publish under a Creative Commons license, which makes their content available for us to republish royalty-free, with varying restrictions depending on the license. The Indy also publishes under a Creative Commons license, making our content available to all for free republication. The publications that we draw from are:

Al Jazeera
Caitlin Johnstone – Daily Writings About the End of Illusions (blog)
Common Dreams
CommonWealth Beacon
Democracy Now
MassWire
open Democracy
Portside (not Creative Commons but much content is available for republication)
Prism
ProPublica
States Newsroom
Strong Towns
The Conversation
The Better News
The Shoestring
Truthout
Waging Nonviolence

These publications allow us to expand our coverage and enable our readers to connect the local to state, national, and global events. For example, CommonWealth Beacon has enabled us to keep tabs on what’s happening at the Statehouse, connecting our readers to legislative developments of local concern like rent control and school budgets (see this week’s post on Gov. Healy’s proposal to find an extra $100 million for struggling schools). The Shoestring, based in Northampton, has provided our readers with important investigative reporting in the region (see this week’s post on local efforts to keep the campaign for rent control alive). And Common Dreams, Truthout, Democracy Now, and Waging Nonviolence, have helped our readers stay on top of resistance to the depredations of the Trump Administration and the ongoing struggle for democracy.

How to Read the Indy
The Indy is putatively a weekly news magazine and while we post new content almost every weekday, the majority of new material comes in and gets posted on Thursday and Friday. On Friday night, we re-organize all of the material that came in during the week into a predictable, “news magazine” format and we email a digest of all of our articles out to our subscribers at 6 a.m. on Saturday (send us a note if you want to get on the email list at amherstindy@gmail.com). On Monday we begin to add new content again. That content appears on our website in the order in which it is posted until Friday, when the order of articles is reorganized into our predictable “news magazine” format.

So What Is That Format? 
News stories are posted at the front of the issue, followed by Resources, Local Events, Opinion, and ending with Features (e.g. Photo of the Week, or our history or nature or gardening columns, or the Town Manager Report) at the back. The exceptions are “Dear Reader” (an occasional letter to readers from the Managing Editor, and our table of contents – “What’s In This Issue?” These need to be up front to provide a guide for reading the issue. Issues & Analyses pieces, which are deep and sometimes technical dives into topics of interest, may appear either in the news section or the opinion section depending on the overall thrust of the piece . Within the news section, town government and school news stories tend to appear up front, and news from the campuses, the region, state, or nation, or news focusing on arts and culture, toward the rear. Our first couple of stories on our “front page”  tend to be the weightiest news stories of the week – the kinds of stories you would find above the fold in a print newspaper.  Within the Opinion section, copy appears in the following order: Public Comments, Letters, and Op/eds.  Op/eds that are reposted from other sources (Daily Hampshire Gazette, Amherst Bulletin, Portside)  tend to appear following original material that was prepared specifically for the Indy.

If you read the Indy on a laptop or tablet, you see a full-page layout but if you read us on your mobile phone you see articles one at a time.  In a typical week, we post two full pages of new content with 12 articles to the page and we try to limit it to that and not run over unto a third page (though sometimes there’s just too much news to stay within the bounds of two pages).

If you read us on a phone, which almost half of you do, you will find our table of contents – “What’s In This Issue?” especially helpful. “What’s in This Issue?” provides a listing of all of the week’s content arranged by subject and with a hyperlink to take you directly to each article so you don’t have to scroll through 24 articles to find what you are looking for.  This also makes for efficient browsing of the entire issue. “What’s in This Issue?” is also where we post our readership analytics which can keep you up-to-date on how many folks are tuning in each week and which articles are receiving the most attention

Some of you have suggested that our issues ought to be shorter/smaller. And some have suggested that should we stick to local content and eschew national issues or reposting from other sources. Collectively though, you don’t agree on what we ought to get rid of. So we suggest that you approach the Indy as you would any newspaper or news magazine. You’re not likely to read the whole thing cover to cover. Pick out the stories that capture your interest and check those out. (Our analytics tell us that the average reader reads 2.3 stories each time they visit our site).  And check out “What’s in This Issue?” to keep tabs on what other folks are reading.

I hope that helps.  Some folks have said that they sometimes miss important editorials because they are “buried at the back of the issue.”  Now that you have a map of the Indy, you know that nothing is buried because you know exactly where to look for whatever you seek.

The Indy as a Paper of Record
We have been tracking local news for over eight years and have amassed a pretty comprehensive record on the work of town government. Our search engine could be better (for example, it does not sort articles in chronological order). But there are multiple ways to search for something. Do you want to find a particular article written by a particular author – say, Darcy DuMont? Click on the hyperlink for Darcy at the top of any article that she has authored and it will present you with a list of everything that she has written in chronological order. Are you looking for articles on a particular subject? Of course you can use the search box in the upper right of any page, but tags are the most effective way to find them.

There is a list of the 48 most commonly searched tags in the right-hand column of any Indy page. Click on the tag, say for UMass, and you will be provided with a listing of every article, in chronological order, tagged as having UMass content. And it doesn’t end with those 48 tags.. There are more than 400 tags (way too many, and it’s on our to-do list to substantially reduce the list), and you can use those tags to find all articles in a series, say A Better World is Possible, or Local and Green. We still need to create a directory of tags (or perhaps just stay within the confines of the fifty most-used tags for which we have room in that right-hand column), but in the meantime, you can also find active tags at the bottom of every Indy article.

Finally, in the right-hand column below the Comments, there is an archive of all Indy posts, organized by date. This is useful if you are trying to track down coverage of a particular meeting – say a school committee meeting from October of last year.

Seeking New Writers
We are always looking for new writers to join us in this community journalism project. Last week we welcomed Ben Polletta to the team.

We’re also looking for experienced copy editors to join our team and help us get the Indy into shape before we post it on Friday nights. Members of the editorial team copyedit manuscripts for clarity, accuracy, grammar, and compliance with our style guidelines. Most work occurs from Wednesdays through Fridays. With the addition of two new editors, we expect that the weekly work volume would be 3–5 articles/week. All work at the Indy is volunteer and, prior to the pandemic, editors met more or less monthly to discuss style and format, brainstorm new story ideas, and more. We haven’t yet resumed staff meetings but it’s a nice idea. We are looking for people who already have editorial experience, preferably in a news medium,  though previous editorial work in academic or technical writing will be fine. If you’re interested, drop us a note at amherstindy@gmail.com and tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience as an editor.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for reading the Indy and best wishes,

Art

Art Keene
Managing Editor