Tendencies of Daily Sabah

It has been more than a year since Daily Sabah started its life with the slogan: "Local Perspective, Global Vision". On Monday every week we reviewed global and local events, especially if they were in the confines of journalism. This week we turn the lens on ourselves once more as we did last July. Our article, published on July 2, 2014 titled, "An even closer look at Daily Sabah," reviewing the ongoing trends in Daily Sabah, was not the first, with a similar one published on April 24, 2014 titled, "A closer look at Daily Sabah." After such a long time, especially in journalism, we decided to once again review the distribution of the news articles, op-eds and columns as well as compare them with the prior articles.

In both "A closer look at Daily Sabah" and "An even closer look at Daily Sabah" we looked at two main concepts. First, I described the distribution of the news articles. We divided them into two categories. The first category is global news and the second is the regional and local news. So, let's first review the numbers from almost a year ago in order to make a healthy comparison:

Let's start with the front pages of the week. In the week of May 25-31, 2015, we have a total of 98 news articles featured in the six issues of our newspaper. Seventeen of them are about global events and issues while 20 can be categorized as regional. The remaining 61 are in the local category. We did not categorize all of the front pages in our previous articles and only shared the numbers of headlines, so let's also review them. "When we looked at the headlines for the week [June 13-19, 2014], four of them were about Turkey's politics while the last two focused on the Middle East." "Headlines were also similar to this week [June 20-26, 2014] with four local and two regional."

As for this week, out of six headlines, four of them were regional and the remaining two were local. Therefore, by comparing these three weeks we can say that in terms of headlines we see regional and local tendencies.

Big picture

Moving on to the entirety of the newspaper we will once again quote the previous articles:

"In the week of June 13-19, 2014 there were a total of 486 news articles and columns in the newspaper. One-hundred and fifty-one of them were focused on global issues, 98 were regional and 237 of them were local oriented."

"In a review of the second week, from June 20-26, 2014, Daily Sabah published a total of 485 news articles, quite close to the previous week. One-hundred and forty of them were about global topics, 95 were on regional matters and 250 were focused on local news."

Going back to the week of May 25-31, 2015, we see a total of 307 news articles. Considering the numbers of two weeks from June 2014, 486 and 485, there seems to be a considerable decrease in total news articles printed in the newspaper. However, bear with us for a little bit since the reason for that revealed itself in the next parameter of our review.

We always said that one of the main factors that make a newspaper stand out in terms of quality and credibility is its unique content. Content produced by its own reporters, editors, columnists, and expats is also a prime selling point that will attract readers. So our review led us to examine them in terms of numbers. Once again a quote from a previous article to act as comparison: "In the week of June 13-19, 2014 more than one-third of the 486 news articles were exclusive content while the rest of them were compiled from different resources for the newspaper readers."

"In the review of the second week, from June 20-26, 2014, the exclusive content was about one-third of the total number."

When we reviewed the numbers of unique news articles in the week of May 5-34, 2015, we were pleasantly surprised. There were a total of 193 unique news articles out of 307, or two-thirds of the newspaper. Quite an increase considering that the past July's ratio was only about one-third of the newspaper. Let's review what we have so far. After nearly a year, Daily Sabah focuses on quality over quantity and makes producing unique content a priority. We gave a suggestion to the editorial board in "A closer look at Daily Sabah": "Firstly, Daily Sabah should increase its staff by placing correspondents in different countries. Secondly, Daily Sabah should be more focused on its own original news articles rather than wire compilations." It seems that second part of our suggestion was taken to heart as it is shown by the numbers. For future reference let me add the distribution of unique content in terms of previously mentioned categories - out of 193 unique news articles, 28 had a global focus, 36 had regional aspects and 129 had a local perspective.

Op-eds and columns

In our two previous articles, we reviewed one additional subject. The categorization of op-eds and columns were distributed into global, regional and local branches as well. Here comes another quote to act as an anchor: "In the week of June 13-19, 2014, the distribution of the op-eds and columns were as follows: 13 regional, 12 local and four global."

"In the review of the second week, from June 20 to June 26, 2014, when we looked at the op-ed and column pages there were no surprises there either, since 13 of them were local, four global and 13 regional articles."

Both weeks from last July yielded similar results, so let's find out if the week of May 25-31, 2015 will make a difference. The total number of articles featured in the op-ed and column pages was 28. Their distribution in categories is as follows: four global, eight regional and 16 local. When comparing these three weeks it would be safe to say that allocation tendencies in these pages stayed similar except for regional articles. Those seemed to go down while the local ones were on the rise. With upcoming elections, this may be temporary, but time will tell. As for the global category though, it stayed firmly in place.

Friendly competition

Last July our page, Reader's Corner, also underwent some changes. We started to make a list every week with the title "This week's most read on Dailysabah.com." You can find them every Monday at the bottom of our page. When we first started, columns dominated the list, with at least three of them managing to grasp the attention of our readers. We also had regular names among our columnists with a seemingly guaranteed place in the top five. But throughout the year it seems that our reporters and editors also threw their hat in the game and sometimes we see weeks without a single column managing to get in the top 10. Nevertheless, we will perhaps collect the date for a more prolonged time period to map out our readers' tendencies in a more definitive manner.

Another thing to note in the top-10 lists is the undeniable rise of our web editors. More often than not we see them getting almost half of the spots in the top 10 with an undeniably good eye for news. We also made a suggestion to our digital executive, Osman Bahattin Dirlik, in our previous article saying: "It would be safe to assume the click counts of the news articles are related to their share count on social media. Therefore, the duty falls upon the Internet department of the newspaper in this matter." It seems they did that by producing unique content that grabs the attention of the readers and became a regular in the top 10 of the week.

All in all, after a year we end our review with a positive tone as we see a considerable increase in unique content in both printed and digital versions of Daily Sabah. Also, the newfound variety in our top-10 lists shows that we are managing to reach out to readers with different expectations.