Editor and co-founder, Jessica Thompson, takes a look back over 2012 and how The Daily Shift has grown since its launch in July…
“About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 350,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 6 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!” – WordPress
The Daily Shift has come a long way since we launched in July 2012. It all began when myself and my co-founder Cáthal Power stepped down from our editors’ posts with another website to set up our own website the following day. We hoped this would be more successful, and our hopes came true. On 1 July 2012, The Daily Shift was launched.
Teamwork is essential when setting up a website. While I slaved away for hours in the back-end of WordPress, to build what you see today, Cáthal worked hard at creating various style guides to ensure there was consistency in the content we published. To say our jobs were easy would be a lie, but our hard work paid off.
From our previous website, we took four loyal subeditors. These were Roisin Peddle, Mark Roche, Kevin Bolger and Denise O’Donoghue. With them came a number of very loyal writers from the previous website. We were a small team working on a shared blog, getting a couple of hundred views per day.
And then we really kicked off. Exactly one week after we launched, The Daily Shift had over 30,000 views and since then we’ve been going from strength to strength, hitting 100,000 views after only 2 months of existence.
Our team has grown significantly, with two new subeditors, Jack Squibb and Josh Prenderville, joining our editorial panel. We have recruited such a large number of new writers who are eager to build up a portfolio of journalistic work that our editorial team of eight is kept nice and busy.
Our team of valued writers has grown from less than ten to more then 120, each of them talented and eager to contribute. Many of these are trainee journalists, and their interests range from current affairs to sport to entertainment, to photography. Many of our writers are dedicated to getting a story out quickly and jumping on trending topics, getting the site stats to over 350,000 in the last couple of months.
What started out as just a shared blog has grown so much over the past six months and it’s all thanks to, not only our team of writers and subeditors, but also to our fans, followers and those of you who regularly turn to us for all the latest news in entertainment, current affairs and sports.
2012 was a great year for The Daily Shift, and WordPress has created a report based on our stats and progress over the past six months. To come this far in just six months provides us with hope and confidence that 2013 is going to be a good year for The Daily Shift.
On behalf of The Daily Shift, I would like to wish a happy new year to all our contributors, fans and followers. May 2013 be as successful for you as we hope it will be for us.
Click here to see the complete report. And feel free to right click on the links and open various posts in new tabs to read the best articles of 2012.
