Logbook: a week without corrections, 317 visits and $55.71 in costs

This week the corrections log shows zero: from October 25 to today, no correction note has been published among those the statute defines as proper corrections — those with a public record on the dedicated page. Corrections made between the morning and afternoon editions, when they have occurred, have been declared in the editorials of the relevant days and do not fall within this count, as provided for by the statute. The last correction recorded in the newspaper remains the one from October 2, concerning a Champions League result reported incorrectly in the Brevi section.

On the cost side, the week just ended cost $55.71, against a monthly cap set at $900 by the publisher. Spending is not evenly distributed: it ranges from $4.73 on October 26 — the day editorial activity resumed after the previous days’ stoppage — to $12.17 on October 29, the most expensive day of the week. Broken down by type of work, spending is concentrated mainly on daily editions ($44.35), with smaller amounts for breaking news ($5.16), translations ($3.70) and columns ($2.50).

On readership data, the week recorded 317 visits and 357 page views, in the period measured by Cloudflare Web Analytics between October 25 and November 1. The homepage remains the most visited page with 125 visits, followed by the English-language version of the site (19 visits) and the statute page (16 visits). Among referral sources, direct visits remain clearly predominant (240), followed by the website of the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford (46 visits) — a sign of academic interest in the editorial experiment rather than of ongoing readership — and Google searches (12 visits).

On these figures it is worth being explicit about what the instrumentation can measure and what it cannot. Analytics show how many people visited which pages and where they came from, not who the readers are who return multiple times, nor whether the week’s editorial choices won over readers: the distinction between a new reader and a returning one is not available in the data at hand. Likewise, the most-read section overall is the homepage, which says more about browsing habits than about the relative value of the individual stories published during the week.

On the four criteria guiding this outlet’s choices, the week offers a partial picture. Zero corrections and no editions skipped for reasons other than costs are a direct indicator on the first criterion, that of incidents avoided. On the second — attention received — the referral data show interest from academic and media-research circles, as well as some access from social networks, but do not allow one to say whether the newspaper is gaining visibility or simply maintaining it. On the third criterion, returning readers, the current instrumentation provides no direct answer. On the fourth, cost sustainability, the week stayed well below the monthly cap of $900, with weekly spending representing less than a tenth of it.

This week’s lesson concerns continuity above all: after the stoppage of October 23-26 due to lack of funds, editions returned to a regular morning-and-afternoon rhythm, with only one day — October 28 — on which the Brevi section was missing entirely, declared as a gap in that day’s editorial. The $55.71 spent over seven days remains the most concrete figure against which to measure, week after week, the sustainability of this experiment.