The coffee cup is a single serving size. Sure, the angle makes the cup look larger than the paper…but that’s the point! 

Expositor, do you really represent yourself as a local paper? Or simply the only printed news available in town?

Let’s examine what your Monday September 24 paper represents for local coverage. For this exercise, we presume a single page is equivalent to five columns wide of typed content (top of page to bottom of page) and that the paper has four sections in length. Each column has approximately 112 lines and 6 words per line: 672 words in total per column.

And let’s not include photographs or ads remembering they can be as big or as small as you want to accommodate filling pages.

The following represents the word count and local content for each Section of Monday’s Brantford Expositor (the detail of each individual page count is at the end of the article)

Front Page and Section A: Pages 1-6

Total words: 7392:  

Section A: 3864 -words Local (52%)

 Section B  Sports: Pages 7-10

Total words: 10,080

Section B: ZERO words Local (0%)

Section C Life: Pages 11-16

Total words: 7392 words

Section C: 1344 -words Local (Obits) (18%)

Section D Entertainment: Pages 17-20

Total words: 4704 words

Zero words Local (0%)

Summary analysis:

There are 20 pages of paper in Monday’s Expositor, including 29,565 words of which 5208 are local emphasis content (just over 17 percent including obituaries/announcements which are paid for). On this day there were virtually no local sports or entertainment stories and the greatest percentage of content came from outside including Post Media outside Brantford, other Canadian sources and United States authors.

If there were only columns of words, no photos or ads, the maximum verbiage would have been 3360 per page times 20 pages or 67,200 words. That would make this Monday’s local content actually 7% of the potential available space. With paid announcements excluded, it would be below 5%.

4BRANT.com and The Expositor are both filling the void left by the closing of BrantNews and I suspect the Expositor doesn’t see alternative digital media to them as competition. This 4BRANT single local story is 489 words or about half a column in The Expositor… and 100% local.

Front Page and Section A: Detail of word count

Page 1:  .25 columns 840 words 

Page 2:  2.5 columns 1680 words

Page 3:  2.0 columns 1344 words

-Including Police Briefings

Page 4:  3.0 columns 2016 words

-National and International Post-Media       

.25 columns 168 words

-One local Letter to Editor

Page 5:  1.0 columns 672 words

-Provincial Post-Media

Page 6:  1.0 columns 672 words

-National Canadian Press

B Section- Sports: Detail of Pages

Page 7:  2.0 columns 1344 words

-Toronto sports

Page 8:  5.0 columns 3360 words

-U.S.A. sports

Page 9:  2.0 columns 1344 words

-Toronto sports

2.5 columns 1680 words

-International and National Box Scores

Page 10: 3.5 columns 2352 words

-National sports

C Section- Life: Detail of Pages

Page 11: 4.0 columns 2688 words

-Canadian Press, /Montreal  Gazette, Ask Amy

Page 12: 1.0 columns 672 words

-Travel

Page 13: 1.0 columns 672 words

-American Press, International

Page 14: 1.0 columns 672 words

-A.P. International

Page 15: 2.0 columns 1344 words

-A.P. International

 2.0 columns 1344 words

-paid for Obituaries

Page 16; 0 words

D Section- Entertainment: Detail of Pages

Page 17: 1.5 columns 1008 words

-U.S.A.

Page 18: 2.0 columns 1344 words

-U.S.A.

Page 19: 3.5 columns 2352 words

-U.S.A.

Page 20: zero columns