We’re celebrating a virtual birthday today at The Daily Item.
It was 15 years ago today that our online platform — itemlive.com — was launched with much fanfare.
“Itemlive.com is without a doubt the most important and exciting step forward we’ve taken at the Item since the turn of the millennium,” then-Publisher Peter H. Gamage, said at the time.
In its initial form, itemlive.com had all the basic elements you would expect from a vintage 2007 newspaper website — online access to breaking news stories, obituaries, and a digital version of each day’s paper. But while the name remains the same, the platform has become so much more than the team could have imagined at the launch.
“Itemlive.com is the backbone of our digital strategy, which has evolved a great deal in the last 15 years,” said current Publisher Ted Grant. “The ability to share breaking news with our readers where they want it and when they want it is critical to our mission as a community newspaper.”
The Daily Item was purchased from Hastings & Sons in 2014 by Essex Media Group (EMG), which added several publications to its portfolio in the past seven years, all of which have a digital presence via itemlive.com. In addition to The Item, EMG publishes the Lynnfield Weekly News, Peabody Weekly News, Suburban Real Estate News, La Voz, 01940 Magazine, 01907 Magazine, 01945 Magazine and North Shore Golf Magazine.
In addition to hosting an archive of all Item stories dating back to 2007, itemlive.com gives readers access to the latest breaking and developing news, sports and obituaries, along with full digital replicas (the eEdition) of each day’s newspaper dating back to July 2016.
The site’s traffic has grown dramatically in the past two years, fueled in part by COVID-19.
“While we continued to publish print editions every day during the pandemic, many people could not get out to buy the paper, so online access became an information lifeline for many of our customers,” said Mike Shanahan, EMG’s CEO. “We’ve seen digital subscriptions increase three-fold since the pandemic started.”
Faced with the critical task of communicating breaking news with the community, EMG made the decision early on in the pandemic to make access to all of its local COVID-19 stories freely available to anyone via the website, regardless of whether they are subscribers or not.
“In the early days of the pandemic we recognized how critical it was that guidance from local and state leaders be disseminated as quickly as possible,” Grant said. “So we revamped our website and social-media platforms so that important COVID news could be available to all as seamlessly as possible.”
The Item also publishes an emailed daily digest of its top stories, which is sent for free early each morning to more than 10,000 people who have opted in for the update. Anyone who would like to receive this update can sign up at www.itemlive.com.
Traffic on the website is likely far beyond any expectations that The Item team could have had in 2007. During the month of December more than 267,000 users accessed the site, averaging nearly 10,000 visitors a day. Those visitors consumed nearly one million pages of online content, with 70 percent of those visitors coming to the website via their mobile phones. Visitors are heavily concentrated in Eastern Massachusetts, but we have readers as far away as South America.
However, itemlive.com’s digital footprint is much bigger than its website. The Daily Item’s Facebook page has nearly 25,000 followers, and our content was viewed more than 2.5 million times on Facebook in 2021. Similarly, our younger Instagram page has more than 4,000 followers, and averages more than 1,000 engagements per day.
“Our web traffic has drawn the attention of key digital advertisers,” said Shanahan. “We have become a cost-effective way to reach local customers online, and support from advertisers helps us continue to improve both our print and online products.”
“News gathering and dissemination is no longer a 9-to-5 activity. Our community has an appetite for news and information 24/7, and itemlive.com gives us the platform we need to feed that appetite,” Grant said. “We pledge to continue to offer the latest in local news via itemlive.com.”
Top 10 itemlive stories of 2021
- SWAT team called to Lynnfield home
- Good intentions, but an apology in Saugus
- Peabody boys hockey varsity season canceled
- George Clooney comes to Lynn
- Lynn singer on American Idol
- Saugus helps with $33.5M for shopping center
- Amazon grocery to Saugus Big Y?
- Two brothers arraigned for Lynn beating death
- Effort to stop the Bali Hai project in Lynnfield
- FBI raids Ocean Street house in Lynn
