San Francisco Business Times editor Patrick Chu sent the following message to his staff on Friday:
Editors, Reporters, Researchers, Designers:
I want to congratulate and thank you on breaking an American City Business Journals’ record for monthly page views in May. We exceeded 4.6 million page views. None of the 40 business journals in our company has ever reached that level for any month. The previous record was 4.5 million. For context and perspective, we have more than tripled page views since I joined the San Francisco Business Times two years ago.
We are a digital-first newsroom. Our record in May is the second-consecutive month of record-breaking metrics. We broke a lot of unique and compelling local business news in real time, stories that couldn’t easily be reported and replicated by our competitors. We serve our readers by immediately filing breaking news alerts, then updating with more news, information, background and context. We work hard as teammates. We openly discuss and share our opinions, and I value your news judgment and beat expertise. I would especially like to thank Digital Producer Riley McDermid for her initiative, hustle and drive.
We still have a lot of work to do to be consistently successful over time. Page views are but just one performance metric and I have seen tremendous progress in other key measures for which we are judged. I have a lot of confidence in you and what we can do as a team. We continue to see some great numbers for online subscriptions every week, which indicates to me that we’re on the right track. I am grateful to work with you and learn from you. Thank you.
