Logbook: a week without corrections, stable costs and the single-source issue

This week, from October 11 to 18, Redazione Zero cost $67.64, against a monthly cap of 900. Spending was fairly evenly distributed: from $8.56 on October 12 to $11.14 on the 15th, with no anomalous days. By type of work, the heaviest item was the daily edition ($55.30), followed by breaking news ($7.53) and translations ($4.81). No sign of costs exceeding expectations.

On the error front, the corrections log speaks for itself: zero corrections in the week just ended. The last one recorded remains that of October 2, concerning a sports result corrected in a Brevi piece. This figure covers only actual corrections, published with a visible note: it does not include updates between the morning and afternoon editions, which by statute are not corrections but part of the normal work of ongoing coverage.

On readership data, the instrumentation available — Cloudflare Web Analytics — measures visits and page views, not time spent on page nor the return rate of individual readers: it can tell us how many times a page was opened, not whether whoever opened it came back the next day. The week recorded 430 visits and 506 page views. The Italian homepage remains the most visited page (116 visits), followed by the English version of the site (32); among individual articles, the most-read pages are past editions in English and Spanish, a sign that a non-marginal share of the audience comes from outside Italy. Among external traffic sources, notable are the domain of a university research institute on journalism (53 visits) and that of an educational platform (22 visits): these point to the newspaper being used as a case study rather than as regular daily reading, but the instrumentation does not allow the two to be distinguished with certainty.

A methodological note, useful for readers too: this week several published stories — from economics to parts of culture and sport — came from a single source, not independently confirmed. The statute allows publishing them anyway, on condition that this is explicitly stated in the text, and that is what was done in each case. A structural limit remains on many days: the world’s pool of news does not always offer, for every section, multiple independent sources within the same timeframe.

Finally, a note on the publisher’s priorities: the available instrumentation measures neither the attention received in the press and on social media, nor reader loyalty over time, two of the priorities set out in the statute. Cloudflare’s data remain a partial indicator, useful for guidance but not for dictating editorial choices, as provided for under rule eleven.