By Isaac Tay (25S06L)
Over the course of this year, I have had the opportunity to meet many new faces. By now, having gone through many rounds of self-introduction, I have defaulted to sharing my CCA as a conversation starter. And I can anticipate the very first question the other person would ask:
”What even is Raffles Press?”
It’s understandable when I’m meeting new people from outside school, but the thing is that this question is also often asked by my fellow batch mates. Many don’t even know this CCA exists.
So, the aim of this article is to tackle the issue of how to reduce the number of students asking these questions every year.
With the clickbait title out of the way, let’s go into a deep dive on why our very own CCA has yet to solidify itself in the impressions of the school population, and if there’s anything we can do about it.
Taking a Peek at the Press Factory
We begin our journey into this matter by starting at the very beginning. Hold on, let me explain.
To understand our overarching issue in greater detail, we must first examine the source. The start of the assembly line. The maternity ward where ideas are birthed into articles.
Don’t worry, producing an article is less messy than giving birth to a child… usually.
The genesis of all of our articles on this website all begin with an idea. Sometimes, this idea is formed during idea pitching sessions. Other times, they simply come on a whim. And that is when the writer takes hold of this idea, grabs it by the throat, and runs along with it.
After the idea is approved by the editors, the writer now sits down and brings this idea to life. It is a very intricate process, and the writer doesn’t know where this idea will be headed most of the time. But just like the wonder and mystery of human life, the writer manages to craft something beautiful out of what was once a jagged, asymmetrical slab of idea.
The writer then welcomes the baby article into the new world. And like most parents, the writer wants what is best for the child. After all, while our parents do say that they are proud of us no matter what, they still want us to be successful.
Same goes for our articles. True, writing articles is a joy in itself, but we do still seek an audience for our articles. So how do our articles fare?
Viewership Rates Over the Years
Let’s start off with the numbers, and see how we, as a whole, have fared in terms of readership over the years.
Things have pretty much stagnated over the past few years, and we’ve stopped hitting numbers like we used to. What’s interesting to point out though, is that the period where we had our highest engagement rates from 2014-2016, was also when we had very controversial articles published. Some of them include “Let’s Talk: RI Slur Culture” in 2016 (which is still a very relevant issue to be addressed, as our Principal, Mr Aaron Loh, has mentioned) and “Why I Rejected the Raffles Academy” in 2014. Both articles garnered many views and became hot discussion topics online.
When we take a look at individual article performances, we do see that quite a number of our highest viewed articles are under the “Please Mind the Platform Gap” series. This series provides more information about student life, and the choices J1 students face in Term 1.
Articles about our A Level results also seem to get quite a lot of views, which could be a sad testament to the hyperfixation on results and grades in our school community. It is quite sad, but it is still a possibility that some students first hear about us during the release of the A level results, well after their JC journey has concluded.
However, to our readers, I thank you all for taking the time to read through our articles. Thank you for always being here with us, through the many batches of Pressies, listening to what we have to say. Hopefully we have served you well, giving you a taste of JC life outside grades and putting a human face behind the name of our school.
But I digress. Back to the analysis.
Based on the numbers alone, two inferences can be drawn:
The first inference is that students are really attracted to controversial pieces. Quite an obvious statement, really, since most people enjoy watching drama unfold before their eyes, and would also do anything for entertainment.
Drama isn’t the only source of amusement, however. We also have our own April Fool’s prank articles every year (which do see its fair share of views). Speaking from my personal story, I learnt about Press back in secondary school when I chanced upon one of the April Fool’s articles.
The second inference is that students visit the Raffles Press website to find out more about JC life and what it has to offer. This can be a good thing, especially to establish ourselves as a trustworthy and reliable source of information.
Perhaps, to get more students to know about and engage with Press, we need to directly solve a need they have. Which raises the question:
What do the People Want?
To find out what the people want, I conducted a semi-formal interview with the target audience (and by this, I mean sitting in the canteen with my classmates during recess and asking them these questions). Some interesting suggestions were raised, such as:
- A Sports section.
- Students want to read more opinion pieces instead of just news coverage.
- People don’t know about the website, which is why they aren’t reading articles.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we have the capacity to have a sports section (given that articles must be published quickly and on a regular basis) so that’s a pipe dream for now. It is also quite comforting to hear the second point, that people do want to read about my own views. And maybe that’s what we have to offer for all: the showcasing of the human side of life in Y5-6 RI.
But let’s take some time now to focus on the third point: people don’t know about the articles we are writing. They don’t know this website exists.
Funniest thing of all, we already have a solution to this. It’s just not being used. In fact, it’s sitting there in a little corner of the website right now, waiting for someone to set their eyes upon it for the first time in a very long while.
I’m talking about the Follow button.
The Follow Button
Look at it, beckoning us to… well… follow it.
Such a simple idea, but so overlooked. I myself never knew this feature existed, until I was well into writing this article. Yet, I think this simple idea will get us more exposure to the wider student population.
Let us use a good example to illustrate this: the PHP Rise and Shine podcast. The podcast episodes themselves are well entrenched in the deepest corners of Ivy, under a module I’m willing to bet nobody has ever touched before: “CCA Events and Publications”.
From my own experience, I never would have ventured into this module, and never would have found the Rise and Shine podcasts on my own. Instead, I only know about them because I turned notifications for Ivy on in my school email. This gave me constant emails every time a new PHP podcast was released. Had it not been for those emails, I never would have known those podcasts existed.
Which brings me to my main point. Nobody reads our articles, because nobody visits our website. Nobody visits our website, because it’s in a totally different place on the Internet. If we want to increase engagement rates, we need to make it easy and convenient for students to read our articles, by using platforms they access frequently, like their emails.
In fact, the same friend of mine who mentioned not knowing where our websites are, also said that he wants to have monthly-newsletter-styled emails about the articles we have published. The demand is already there, folks.
What I’ve done in the past two paragraphs is basically explain how our dear friend, the Follow button, works. We do have email subscription services. So! We already have the solution, what’s the problem then?
The problem is how to get students to press (haha Press haha get it?) on the follow button in the first place. Our poor Follow button, in a cruel twist of irony, is faced with the very same problem it is trying to solve. The email subscription service makes reading articles more convenient, but going to our website and clicking on the button is inconvenient in the first place.
To put it in Chemistry terms, this is the rate-determining step. This is the intermediate reaction that limits the rest of the reaction from taking place. This action, if addressed, will spark the jump in view counts, the reaction we want to see.
So what can we do about it?
I suggest that we make all our student emails automatically subscribed to the Raffles Press website. We send out monthly newsletters, with highlights from articles published that month. It’s not spam, since the frequency of these emails would not be high. Furthermore, students would always have an option to unsubscribe from these emails. But for the typical JC student who is more focused on the mountain of lectures/tutorials/CCA, I am sure that he or she would not be bothered to put that much effort into unsubscribing.
Conclusion
This issue of getting engagement rates, or at least getting people to know who we are, is something that can never be solved permanently. This issue will still exist for future batches of JC students. But I think that authenticity, while in the pursuit of relatability, should never be compromised. Let us not forget the intricacies of weaving ideas into life, and remember that crafting articles is a joy in itself, regardless of views.
Of course, other baby steps, like the auto-subscription idea mentioned above, can be taken into account as well. But the focus should remain on producing good quality articles.
One final note: how should we implement the auto-subscription feature? To be honest, I don’t know the technical skills required for this. So I say we give it to the Computer Science Society students. Let them figure it out.
Title image courtesy of: https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1557992260-ec58e38d363c?q=80&w=1974&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA==