quality not quantity
I gave a lecture on the theme of “the online foreign correspondent” at the journalism faculty of the University of Central Lancashire yesterday. The students were great - highly engaged and they asked a tonne of questions - “what’s the business model?” “what amount of traffic does Kigali Wire get?” “how do you make money?”…
The traffic question interested me. I did follow the statistics quite closely when I first launched the site a year ago. However since I moved more towards doing photography which naturally meant a switch from the WPNewspaper WordPress theme to the more snap-friendly Graph Paper Press, stats are not of much interest.
Indeed, blog posts are less frequent - I’m of the “if you’ve got nothing to say, don’t say it” school, when it comes to blogs - although the news wire is updated more than it ever was.
No. The key indicator for me with the blog these days is contacts.
Who contacts me because of the blog, who knows me by blog before ever meeting me, who reads the blog, who would be open to talking to me because of the blog. Those are the key things for me.
I won’t list the people I’ve met and gotten to know well through Kigali Wire, but they include Rwandan journalists and exiled Rwandans, diplomats, famous authors, Rwanda scholars, foreign correspondents, NGO and development staff, PhD researchers…
An interesting contact gets in touch with me because of the blog two or three times every month. They’re the only stats I’m interested in.
Oh… and inbound links :)
