Last month (March 2004) we asked readers to give us their opinion of the new Gazette, which was re-launched in September 2003 as a bilingual, biweekly four-page print newsletter with a companion e-zine.
We received 183 responses to the readership survey divided as follows:
Readers seem generally pleased, although professors tended to be more critical of several features of the new Gazette. For example, more than 70 percent of respondents among support staff said that were generally very satisfied with the Gazette, while just a third of professors expressed the same level of satisfaction.
More than half of faculty respondents also said that they didn’t take part in the quick poll and that the e-mail notification service about the online Gazette wasn’t useful to them.
Respondents generally expressed strong interest in the content of the Gazette, with the most popular topics being general campus news, and news about members of support staff and their work, reflecting the large proportion of respondents from support staff. Both groups expressed very strong interest in the events calendar.
The Gazette e-zine also received positive feedback with 88 percent of respondents saying that they visited the Web site at least some of the time. Not surprisingly, “Canada’s university in the news”, which consistently ranks among the top visited pages, was rated by respondents as one of the most useful online features.
Fewer than half of respondents, however, were aware that they could comment on an article or suggest a story online.
One concern often expressed by readers was the lack of debate and candid criticism in the Gazette.Some readers felt that the publication was too focussed on the priorities of the administration and that more space should be devoted to other issues. An advisory committee has been set up to provide reader feedback the Gazette’s goals, mandate and strategies and to suggest improvements. The committee met for the first time in mid-April 2004.
For more detailed results of the Gazette readership survey see tables under related links.
You can view the list of winners in our draw here.
Table 1: Evaluation of new format
Table 2: General evaluation of content
Table 3: Questions related to Web site
