One month, the readership of St Francis Today was minding its own business at around 10,000 reads. Next thing you know, more than 35,000 reads were recorded over a 30-day period, which in a town of this size feels statistically high. Not a surge, exactly. More of a slow, steady increase, possibly fuelled by collective village boredom and a mild curiosity about what might happen next. Let’s have a quick look at some insights as to who you, the readers, are, and what habits you have formed around St Francis Today.
This Is Apparently a Thing Now
Most readers are local, but a growing number are reading from further afield. I was recently introduced to a couple from Holland who were here on holiday and read St Francis Today daily back home. They were particularly fascinated by the groyne project, which made sense given that the Dutch have been quietly holding the sea at bay for several centuries and tend to take an interest when others attempt the same thing.
Around the same time, an old school friend now living in the USA sent me a Facebook message that I picked up about a month late, largely because Facebook is social media for very old people, not me, and I no longer understand how Facebook Messenger works. He also mentioned that he reads St Francis Today whenever he can, which turns out to be quite often, as he retired at 40 and has spent the last 16 years surfing and producing a small range of novelty t-shirts. Retired at 40. One of us clearly made some poor decisions earlier in life.
This Is Not Clickbait
What connects you is not outrage, novelty, or click-baity nonsense, even if we occasionally wander dangerously close for our own amusement. It is attentiveness. You read past the headline. You notice when something changes. You remember what was published last week.
You mostly read from the Eastern Cape, with a growing number checking in from elsewhere, maintaining a quiet, long-distance interest in how this small town conducts itself. You might follow a link on Facebook, or you might type the address directly, which suggests either loyalty, habit, or a refusal to trust algorithms with anything important. You mostly read on laptops, quietly defying the internet’s utter insistence that everything meaningful in this universe must now happen on a phone while waiting for coffee.
There is no manifesto. Interestingly, there is a subscription form, but most people cannot find it. This has not slowed things down. Instead, you return the old-fashioned way, through habit, curiosity, and a vague sense that something interesting might have happened while you were doing something else.
Here’s the subscription form, just in case.
If you are reading this today, you know all of this stuff. You are already part of it, and whether you meant to or not, you are now one of the people who can say with conviction, “I read that somewhere.”
Or, on a less generous day, wonder who the hell keeps letting this thing publish.
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From our small town to wherever you are reading from, merry Christmas.
the editor.
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