It’s always amazed me how people find our stories. About 28 percent of our readers come from sites that link to our home page or individual stories. Another 29 percent come from search engines that refer to our articles. And the last 43 percent come directly to our site.
Undoubtedly many of those in the 43 percent come to us from the daily news update we’ve sent to subscribers’ e-mail addresses since we first launched in 2005.
I’ve always been surprised how many people, in fact, only know about what we do from what they see on our e-mails. Yet the e-mail had grown into a daily afterthought for us. We would scramble all day to put together all of these stories and then just put the e-mail in motion for the night.
We’re no longer going to treat it like that. People are using twitter, RSS, facebook, Digg and any number of other ways to get their news. And so are we. But our most intimate connection with thousands of readers is still our daily e-mails.
So I’m proud that we’ve both redesigned and added major value to the newly cast Morning Report. Each day, alongside the headlines, we’re going to give a brief rundown of the stories. Here’s what we did today, for example.
You can still skim the headlines, but no longer will the dozens of short posts we put up be lost and identified with only vague headlines. And the summary should provide a simple, lively way to stay on top of what we published even if you don’t have time just then to read it.
Give it a try for a while (sign up here) and let me know what you think.