Michele's List
Building blocks in the emerging local news ecosystem

Visit the site
Statistics
Unique monthly visitors

143,590
Average page views

805,089
Average visits

514,377
E-newsletter

  • No
Facebook followers

17,391
Twitter followers

3,994
Instagram followers

n/a
You Tube

388
Revenue

  • $251,000 - $500,000
Primary revenue source(s)

  • Local advertising (including web and e-newsletter ads)
Ad products

  • Traditional Web display advertising sold directly by your organization
  • Video advertising
  • Sponsored content or native advertising
  • Daily deals
Paywall

  • No
Distribution

  • Direct to web/mobile
Total personnel/contributor FTE

5
Date of most recent publisher update

05/28/2019
Last Publisher Update

  • 2019-05-28 20:05:49 UTC
The Batavian
New York
The Batavian

Digital news pioneer Howard Owens started this upstate New York local news blog for Gatehouse Media. When GateHouse made strategic changes eight months later, Owens acquired The Batavian's name and relaunched the website as his own business in 2008. Revenue: Advertising and video production.

Who is in charge?

Howard Owens

Job title

Publisher

City

Batavia

State

NY

Zip code

14020

Year launched

2008

Tax status

  • LLC

Geographic scope

  • Other

Other geographic focus

small city/rural county

Population of coverage area

57000

Scope of coverage

  • General news or a number of topics that are not necessarily closely related to each other

Primary focus

  • Current news and events

Topics of coverage

  • Crime & justice
  • Entertainment & arts
  • Events in coverage area
  • Government
  • Other

Other content topics

weather, economics, and I have to leave unchecked sports, politics, planning, business (especially ag) should all be on our list, too.

Watchdog journalism?

  • Yes, infrequently

Facebook link

thebatavian

Site Twitter handle

@thebatavian

Effective engagement practice

Almost all engagement is on Facebook. Facebook has killed our own comment section though we still have a dozen or so readers who regularly comment on thebatavian.com. I interact more with readers on thebatavian.com than I do on Facebook.

Revenue challenges

We continue to face the same challenge we faced 10 years ago: building an audience and selling ads is easy -- the hard part is finding the resources to support revenue growth in other revenue streams. You can only bootstrap so much before you run out of strap.

In the news

Nope. We're all but forgotten by the pundits and news industry reporters and publications.