Some thoughts on SligoToday.ie

SligoToday.ie - High Achieving, but complacent?

With it’s publication earlier this month of a claim of 4,500,000 hits per calendar month for the now firmly established three year old local news gathering website, SligoToday.ie it has become a morning mainstay for those of us online in the North West.

With so much achieved, isn’t there a real and substantial risk that without ambitious plans for the future and an investment of new ideas, complacency could set in and SligoToday.ie could be overtaken by a new, hungrier and more motivated competitor that won’t make many of the trial and error mistakes that pioneers so often make?

Without any existing serious competition in the online world for local news gathering services in the North West, SligoToday.ie has a had a virtual free reign on building an online presence that provides people with comprehensive local news they are able to read before 9:00am every morning. This early morning, deadline driven ethos has provided the backbone of the website’s success, however, in the future, as audiences become more sophisticated and demanding, it will not be enough.

Already promises of implementing Sligo Today TV have begun, but not in any serious or comprehensive manner. The impression I have gotten so far from this is that the videos lobbed up on to YouTube are just an optional extra to be done when it can. If this is the prevailing attitude in SligoToday.ie, it is wrong. Video and audio podcasts should become mainstays of the website, integrated fully with the SligoToday.ie brand. By producing audio and especially video, it provides an extra revenue stream through sponsorship and advertising, but also it will provide the viewer or listener with a more comprehensive and accurate reflection of the news that can’t be provided in writing.   There are a variety of programme formats to choose from, apart from the obvious ones like news & sports bulletins and diggnation-esque type shows.

One of the pluses of a local news gathering websites around the world for both users and website operators, are the communities that grow up around them in comments sections of  published articles. Currently, there are a few gems being added to by article  commenters in an otherwise  substance free zone. Too often the comments section becomes a childish morass of name calling and badly spelt stereotypes being peddled by the usual time wasters and single issue obsessives. To counter this, and to build the comments sections of articles into something more akin to a community of SligoToday.ie users, I would begin by employing paid commenters to raise substantive points on articles and to flesh them out.

When people post a comment on any article, they do so because they want others to read it, SligoToday.ie should be helping them achieve this by ditching the IntenseDebate comments platform and moving to the Disqus comments platform. Using Disqus, it is easy for commenters to simultaneously post their comments to a variety of Social Media networks such as Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn, increasing the audience exposure of the comment, the article and ultimately the website as a whole. Everybody wins.

There are other ideas and variations of the direction SligoToday.ie is currently on that I would like to see, such as better use of photographs, mobile/tablet version of the site and all round better use of social media that is used to engage with users, rather than the current use of just outputting links to articles, but that’s for others to decide.

I’ve written this, not out of a sense of begrudgery, but as someone who uses the website on a daily basis and is better informed on what is happening in Sligo than if it wasn’t there, but I believe it is only a matter of time before another Sligo based news website is established that will overtake SligoToday.ie by innovating and improving on what came before. Just because SligoChampion.ie, SligoWeekender.ie and Ocean FM are low value websites now, doesn’t mean they will be forever.

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