Julian Gairdner, Editor of Farmers Weekly Interactive – Winner of Editorial Individual 2009

Julian Gairdner has led a significant organisational change within the Farmers Weekly Group, resulting in fully integrated editorial, production and sales functions across web and print, as well as a research and redesign process which is paying dividends in traffic and diversified commercial results.

Julian Gairdner accepting AOP Editorial Individual AwardHis approach has been to encourage the FWI team to have confidence to try new things, transitioning an editorial team that is now fully integrated across web and print. A motivated editorial team is now delivering:

• News, features, reports and advice
• Distance e-learning modules
• Forums
• Blogs
• Cover-it-live web chat
• Image galleries
• Video
• Landing pages for keywords and industry events
• User-generated content

Gairdner has also driven forward a content strategy which has allowed Farmers Weekly to diversify its sources of online revenue to include:

• Blog sponsorship
• Competitions
• Third party revenue share agreements
• Distance e-learning Academies
• Jobs/recruitment/E-classified
• Property advertising and search
• Syndicated content

Meeting the needs of the audience

Over the past year, FWI.co.uk’s Editor has driven and been responsible for a complete site redesign, involving:

• Audience mapping to identify its core (yolk of the egg) and non-core (white of the egg) audience – see graphic below

Audience mapping for fwi.co.uk

• Completion of an online research project to identify audience views of current web offering and content priorities
• Commencement of a redesign process with the following objectives:

1. User-centred
2. Strengthening accessibility of transactional content
3. Strengthening accessibility of social media content – images, forums and blogs
4. Strengthening visibility of and differentiating news and features
5. Increasing pages consumed per user
6. Improving positioning of display ads

• Preparation and testing of prototype design pages for research. Feedback was the best RBI has ever had for a site redesign
• Building and release of a brand-new home page (January 2009), an overwhelming success: Traffic across the site in Jan and Feb ‘09 is up 3.22m page views (or 68%) year on year. Specifically, better design on the home page has added 60k page views per week to FWI’s e-classifieds section and 5k page views per week to its jobs service

Individual innovation and enterprise

Always looking to innovate, both in terms of content and new website features, In the past 12 months Gairdner led the launch of a niche online dating service (Muddy Matches), a new jobs service, a revitalised property search portal, a new design and been the first site at RBI to move onto its new web platform.

Judges' Comments

“Clearly a natural digital editor, Julian displays a strong understanding of his target market, producing innovative editorial devices outside the traditional core pillars of web journalism. He has demonstrated a highly skilled approach to both strategy and execution.”
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