Asbury Park Graduation Coverage Brings Results
The Asbury Park Press Information Center, digital team and advertising departments provided Asbury Park readers with comprehensive coverage of local high school graduations. The cooperation here results in popular content for readers, shows a can-do spirit by the staff and brings in incremental revenue. A success all around. This is only one example of the strong graduation coverage provided by Gannett newspapers. We salute these efforts.
Executive Editor Hollis Towns forwarded the details in an e-mail to Vice President/News Kate Marymont. Hollis wrote:
Over the past two weeks, we have sent photographers to all 58 high school graduations in our region. We wrote a Page One centerpiece at the start of the graduation season, and we continue to promote the galleries daily on the front page.
Response from readers has been phenomenal. In the latest tally, the galleries have generated more than 1 million page views.
We created a graduation page on our Web site (https://www.app.com/section/GRADUATIONS) that contains all of the galleries. Graduations have remained the main item on our home page, too, and we keep the package fresh by rotating in a different picture every hour.
Traffic to other stories also has increased as readers, drawn from the print teasers, have explored other news stories.
Advertising sold 3 1/2 pages featuring photos of graduates to local families. The ads generated $9,000 in additional revenue.
The Information Center, working with Digital and Advertising, leveraged our community reach to deliver solid results on all of our platforms. We are already drawing up plans to expand on this next year.
So how did we coordinate all of these graduations in such a short window? Every photographer on the staff adjusted his or her schedule for the two-week crunch. Our metro editor had all the bureau chiefs file and double check all 58 assignments.
The plan was to produce 75 to 100 photo galleries for each school. GMTI bumped up our photo load to 300 images at a time.
The assistant multimedia editor controlled the pace of photographers transmitting images to avoid clogs in the system.
Our busiest night of 18 graduations went off without a hitch, and everything was posted by 7 a.m. for our viewers.
Last Modified: June 2009