Enormous success in our first year of partnership with the Boston Marathon

As the new broadcast and coverage partner of the historic Boston Marathon, this past Patriots’ Day was an enormous undertaking that yielded spectacular results and established a platform for growth in future years.

The project gave us a welcome opportunity to create a large volume of positive and interesting content, while also presenting me an opportunity to exercise leadership that extended beyond the walls of my newsroom.

Planning for this enormous event began before Thanksgiving, when I led my team in assembling a lengthy document of content ideas and coverage proposals. In subsequent months, the work of implementing our plans required contributions from every member of our team, cooperation with peers from our sister stations and support from a surprisingly-large network of engineers.

Highlights of the effort for me included coordinating coverage across all four of our company’s New England newsrooms; managing live stream engineering across the four participating sites and OTT platform; pioneering a popular new Find You Finish video feature; and crafting unique content used across all platforms.

Without sharing specific data, I can boast that the coverage…

• Yielded our best single day of 2023 for video views, 275% over our daily goal.
• Doubled our average rate of daily video views per session.
• Provided the biggest day for sessions since the coverage of a March Nor’easter.
• Achieved 361% of our daily average for social engagements.

I’m also grateful to share that a corporate supervisor recently shared praise both for the success of the day’s coverage and our comprehensive efforts to coordinate the regional partners.