“It’s about building on the foundations we’ve created over the last two years and bringing even more solutions to the business community.”
That’s the message from Richmond News publisher Alvin Chow, as he looks back on his near two-year reign and the newspaper’s achievements in 2019, as well as peering ahead to the challenges that lie in wait for 2020.
Chow singled out the News clinching a Ma Murray Newspaper Excellence Award in the spring and the success of the News’ Feast Asian Dining Festival in the fall as the highlights of the year.
“We challenged the team to get a Ma Murray Award and they did it; which reinforced that we are delivering quality journalism to the community, which is so important,” said Chow.
“The Feast Dining Festival, for me, is the bandwidth of the newspaper, in terms of how far we can reach into the community.
“It’s not just reporting what’s happening in the community, it’s about being involved and being a voice for all the sponsors and partners that made Feast a great success.”
Asked what he sees in store for the News in 2020, Chow cast his mind back to the hysteria 20 years ago, as the world worried over the upcoming Y2K and how technology would cause a global economic meltdown.
“The world kept going and technology kept going. The way I see next year is how the newspaper can use that technology to deliver the news to our readers,” Chow explained.
“This leads me to think, how are we going to integrate both the digital and print products into 2020?
“Working with Google analytics and data is going to help us work out what a typical reader likes in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. We need to cater to their needs, as well as obviously having breaking news.”
And on the back of recent statistics received from Vividata – a leading Canadian cross-media consumer research agency – the combined readership of the print and digital Richmond News products actually went up.
“More than six out of 10 people in Richmond, aged 18 and over, read the Richmond News,” revealed Chow.
“That’s kudos to our news team; we see stories reported really late in the evening and early in the morning. We are expected to deliver that.
“We actually reach 62 per cent of the people in Richmond that identify as Chinese. If you look at the data, it means we are the number one news outlet in the community, while others are only 20 to 40 per cent.”
Chow also raved about the News’ growing army of readers online at Richmond-News.com, where page views average around 650,000 a month, with almost 212,000 unique visitors per month.
“We have invested in digital reporters and our digital platform and it’s starting to show,” he added.
That’s one of reasons why Chow and the News’ sales team are keen to launch even more options in their suite of digital products for advertisers.
“We will have more digital products, as well as a combination of digital and print products for businesses in Richmond, whether they want to reach the Richmond community or to a wider audience outside,” said Chow.
“Our sales team is prepped for 2020 with a huge challenge to help businesses to grow. And credit to our company for allowing us to look at it from an entrepreneurial viewpoint.”
As we move into 2020, Chow wanted to remind the community that the News is more than a newspaper.
“We can do product distribution, offer digital products, social media solutions and we can optimize websites, as well as online ads in our network,” he said.
“We can even create events to help businesses promote their products; we’re not just a newspaper. Delivering news is the core of what we do, because we can generate an audience.
“But it also comes down to trust. People trust us.”
