OP-ED: CHEK News Reaching Around the Globe

What do North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, Pope Francis and a penguin have in common?

Not much, you would think.

Well, one of the things they have in common is that they apparently don’t use our website www.cheknews.ca.

No big surprise there, you’d think. Not everyone reads the CHEK website, even if it is good for their health and their mind and overall wellbeing. And penguins as far as we can tell dress to the
nines but can’t read, but they’d probably enjoy seeing our weather.

Viewers are all missing out on some very cool stuff.

Today, they could have settled down and watched Rob Shaw’s very illuminating interview with Bonnie Henry or seen that Ed ad Jeff celebrated Robbie Burns Day by pretending to like haggis outside Orr’s The Butcher in Saanichton.

That may have gone over the heads — or under the beak — of their divine highnesses and Penguin Pete, but in time they’d have come to love Bonnie and The Upside as much as CHEK viewers.

To explain: we just did our 2020 Analytics, on who uses the CHEK News website.

One of the most fascinating findings is that the website was accessed by people in almost every country in the world last year.

Quite amazing, but we had no “users” in The Vatican, North Korea, or Antarctica.

According to CHEK’s Google Analytics data, www.cheknews.ca reached more than 8.6 million people in over 230 countries, dependent territories, and special areas.

But what’s clear is we have to do more work if we want to get people using our site in Vatican City and North Korea. Although we did reach 2,581 users in South Korea and 3,742 in Italy,
respectively.

Vatican City is the smallest country in the world. The second smallest is Monaco, where CHEK had 14 users in 2020. The third-smallest is the tiny Island of Nauru with 9 CHEK users. If you can’t place it, Nauru is 1,651 kilometres north of Vanuatu, where CHEK had 20 users.

CHEK even reached the tiny republic of Togo in West Africa, where we had 12 users.

The only continent, we didn’t reach was Antarctica. But we got close. We had nine users in the city of Ushuaia on the southernmost tip of Argentina and we had a single user in the Falkland Islands.

Ushuaia is 368 kilometres closer to Antarctica than the Falklands, according to Google — but who trusts them.

CHEK’s core audience is obviously Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland and British Columbia. Unlike global media brands, such as The Guardian and The New York Times, we don’t strive for more readers or viewers in, say, Australia or Papua New Guinea.

But having said that, it is nice to know they’re clicking on our site.

The media world has, literally, become very crowded over the past 20 years or so — but in absolutely striving for a local market, we’re not part of the noise.

We do what we do best — provide news, information, and entertainment for our Vancouver Island audience.

It’s no surprise in the media world that local TV is king these days — more people rely on television for local news than ever before, according to all major pollsters.

It’s also no surprise that our news ratings are up significantly over last year — people want to know the latest on COVID-19 in their own backyard.

We just hadn’t figured our “reach” reached around the world so effectively. In the newspaper world, we used to call readers in areas that didn’t attract advertising “vanity circulation.”

Nice to have, but they didn’t help the bottom line when you measured readership.

But we kinda like having people around the glove paying attention to what’s happening on the local front. We don’t know if they’re expatriates or just passing through our website. But
welcome. We’re real friendly.

So come on Vatican and North Korea, time to join the rest of the world. We’ll give the penguins
a pass. Some audiences are just too tough.

Journalist and author Ian Haysom works as a consultant with CHEK TV

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