We're Los Santos News and we'd like feedback

[Blöp]

In my opinion, the most important and biggest improvement would be consistency. I am a person IRL who reads the news every single day and I'm actively following the news on several portals because I know they are publishing continuously. On our local server, I played in a news faction (Lifeinvader) for a long time and it was really enjoyable because people reacted to our writings in-character. When it comes to in-character news here, to be completely honest I do not care about them because I have no idea about when and how could it affect my character so I simply don't invest the time to follow the forum section time-to-time. My ideas based on my previous experience in other places:

 

1.) Communicated Consistency

I would love to know when you publish your articles. In real-life news mediums usually have a fixed timeline for different articles (if it is planned and not some breaking news of course). It would be a huge plus for people like me to know when can I expect the news on the topics I'm curious about. I know it is sometimes challenging to deal with things like that since it is not your IRL job but in that case, doing less but more calculable usually comes with better results. 

 

For example, I would love to see a huge weekly article about the news I should need to know about. You could even create a weekly newspaper where you collect and publish all the most important news from that week. If you communicate (on forums, in-character ads, roleplaying situations) when can people expect the news, it would add a lot in my pov.

 

2.) More Visibility

One of the most important things that helped me achieve trust and curiosity with people on our local server is simply that I was everywhere. I drove around with our company news truck when I was online and as soon as I saw some police activity, car crash, anything I jumped out and I was in the first few people who knew about the things. People saw me driving around (a faction car with a nice eye-catching livery would help you a lot tbh.) and after a few months, they started to care about what we do. I have 700ish hours on the server and not going to lie, I saw news-related people... maybe once? Increasing the number of your team, making a faction car, using some uniform would help a lot in my opinion. 

 

3.) Dedicated Platform

Right now (as far as I know) the only place where I can find your writings is on this page. When I am here, I need to browse several pages to find your articles and the fact that I need to scroll through 'sick youtube videos' and other not news related stuff just makes the work you do feel less important. I loose my out-of-character will to read the articles to the point where I would find them. This can be resolved in many ways, I would talk to someone who can make little changes on the forum and I would request a dedicated place on the front page for the in-character news. Online news and blogs should not be in the same place in my opinion because it creates a lot of mess. I am not interested in reading anything other than the news. Creating a subforum at least for all registered news outlets would be a huge improvement, I would totally push this towards the admin team. It would make people like me click more often to the news, which would increase my in-character curiosity about your job too.

 

TL;DR: I would love to:

1.) know when will you post the news;

2.) know when will I receive news about the topics I'm interested in;

3.) receive a weekly/monthly recap about the most important news (this should be advertised in-character);

4.) read your things on a separate forum to not force me to see your things in the same place as shitty blogs.

 

Other than these things, before writing this comment I read the past few articles (for the first time, ngl) and what you do is great. I can't even suggest anything related to the quality of your work, just to increase visibility and accessibility in every possible way. Something important happened? Cool, advertise the shit out of your article in-character, force me to see it. It will not give you quick results but after a few months, it will definitely make a difference in the community. ☺️ 

 

Keep up! 

[LSNN]

59 minutes ago, liafriuli said:

1.) Communicated Consistency

I would love to know when you publish your articles. In real-life news mediums usually have a fixed timeline for different articles (if it is planned and not some breaking news of course). It would be a huge plus for people like me to know when can I expect the news on the topics I'm curious about. I know it is sometimes challenging to deal with things like that since it is not your IRL job but in that case, doing less but more calculable usually comes with better results. 

 

From an internal thing, we're working on a rough timeline of when to post articles, ideally, we're aiming for the afternoon from 12 PM to 5 PM, like this from our research can provide much better viewership numbers compared to 1 am style articles. And yes, it's a difficult challenge because we're struggling with manpower on a daily basis which can lead to a high amount of stress on myself. 

 

1 hour ago, liafriuli said:

2.) More Visibility

One of the most important things that helped me achieve trust and curiosity with people on our local server is simply that I was everywhere. I drove around with our company news truck when I was online and as soon as I saw some police activity, car crash, anything I jumped out and I was in the first few people who knew about the things. People saw me driving around (a faction car with a nice eye-catching livery would help you a lot tbh.) and after a few months, they started to care about what we do. I have 700ish hours on the server and not going to lie, I saw news-related people... maybe once? Increasing the number of your team, making a faction car, using some uniform would help a lot in my opinion. 

 

Visibility is something we are actively working on with Faction Management, including our new vehicles, which have been submitted to the modding team for testing and approval, but this is sadly out of our hands, as we have no control over it. And we hate to reiterate it, but we're simply just one person at this time, we have a very very low application rate, within the last two months we had only two people even bother to apply to join us, and they went inactive even after being hired. 

 

1 hour ago, liafriuli said:

3.) Dedicated Platform

Right now (as far as I know) the only place where I can find your writings is on this page. When I am here, I need to browse several pages to find your articles and the fact that I need to scroll through 'sick youtube videos' and other not news related stuff just makes the work you do feel less important. I loose my out-of-character will to read the articles to the point where I would find them. This can be resolved in many ways, I would talk to someone who can make little changes on the forum and I would request a dedicated place on the front page for the in-character news. Online news and blogs should not be in the same place in my opinion because it creates a lot of mess. I am not interested in reading anything other than the news. Creating a subforum at least for all registered news outlets would be a huge improvement, I would totally push this towards the admin team. It would make people like me click more often to the news, which would increase my in-character curiosity about your job too.

 

Creating a subforum is completely out of our hands, and it's not up to us, we can always ask our Faction Management handler about this, but it's highly unlikely on getting approval for such a trivial thing, the Online News and Stories is our only place at this time to post articles, sadly. But we can of course, pass the feedback along and see how far that gets us. 

1 hour ago, liafriuli said:

1.) know when will you post the news;

 

At this time, we do have a little discord, that will have updates when articles and important news is posted, anyone is welcome to join, we'll let readers know when a new article is posted> https://discord.gg/em6FKcb

 

1 hour ago, liafriuli said:

3.) receive a weekly/monthly recap about the most important news (this should be advertised in-character);

 

Monthly recaps are hard for us, as it involves a large number of man-hours to review the right subforums to research and ultimately write, stories do take a large amount of time to write and then check the story, get comments from LSPD/FD/SD, etc. But we're still looking into better ways to streamline this process. 

[Iosif]

Get an editor.

[LSNN]

16 hours ago, Iosif said:

Get an editor.

Things like this are easier said than done, we do recruit, we just need people to apply, however, we have recently recruited some more staff to help us in making articles and content.