No one is more curious about who reads Cedar Key News than the people who are responsible for its publication. Those people are the Cedar Key News Board of Directors, our small staff and the managing editor.
We run contests that elicit entries that tell us who reads our paper, both online and the print editions. We study the reader-counts of each article published online, thanks to a computer-based tabulator. We also get a count of how many individual (anonymous) computers visit our web site each day. To our continued amazement, we have more than one thousand visits each day. Obviously, many people outside Cedar Key check up on us regularly.
The contest entrants, either by email or by letter, hail from as far away as British Columbia. Many entrants do not live in Florida. And, that is at least a partial explanation of why we have such a large number of visits to our web site.
When we look at how many readers click on a specific article we see counts of a few hundred up to nearly one thousand for any one article. The City Commission agenda announcements usually get a couple of hundred readers between the agenda's posting on Wednesday and the next Tuesday's meeting. Fishing articles and the Dog of the week are always popular. However, articles about City Hall and the Police Department get the most attention from our online readers.
Letters to the Editor are a measure of reader involvement. By that standard Cedar Key News is a failure. Since the cancellation of the sometimes abused online "Speak Out" our readers have been uncharacteristically silent. (We do withhold the names of letter writers if they or we fear retribution.) Tell us who are readers are by sending us a Letter to the Editor! Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are foundation stones of democracy. Cedar Key News provides a soapbox for our readers' freedom of speech. The month of October, more than any other month, is the time to use that soapbox. Let us have your Letters to the Editor, by email or by post. | 