Coverage of the Australian election resulted in record numbers for Nine Publishing: the biggest day for subscriber pageviews ever for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and the best performing weekend in at least two years for The Australian Financial Review.

Across a five-week political campaign that lasted until the beginning of May this year, articles produced by the newsrooms received, on average, a substantial bump in traffic compared to the election campaign in 2022.

This can be attributed to a number of factors.

Live coverage

Blogs have always proven a winner with our readers, and, by combining all the latest news in one destination, they drive repeat visits and encourage reader habits.

During the election period, our blogs featured all the political appearances across TV and radio, as well as housing livestreams of press conferences on developing stories across the day. This allowed the online desk to send push notifications and alert readers to breaking news.

The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian Financial Review used push notifications as an easy lever to direct readers’ attention to the latest information.

In particular, during the leaders’ debates between the prime minister and opposition leader, alerts to the live blog were used at various times — start, heated moment, closing arguments, and verdicts — to keep readers updated and form habits and awareness of our deep political coverage.

Blogs also allow journalists to file incremental updates instead of creating entirely new stories on smaller moments. This keeps article volume under control across the newsroom, so that stronger pieces can have better distribution plans, including a longer home page presence.

Election blogs were consistently among our best-read articles, especially in the final week of the campaign as more readers tuned in to be better informed ahead of polling day.

Slow blogs

In that same vein, lessons learned from the last election in 2022 resulted in one of the most-engaged elements of The Age’s coverage this year: a localised slow blog.

In 2022, the newsroom decided to cover, in depth, three electorates in Victoria. For each electorate, the same article shell was updated over a period of time with colour and news from the hotly contested political seats.

In 2025, instead of having three separate articles, The Age decided to combine all of its on-the-ground coverage into a weekly article, housed in our live article format, rather than a standard news article format.

This allowed the inclusion of date and time-stamped updates and the ability to highlight key events, as well as build community engagement with subscribers amassing thousands of comments per article. It is a strategy that has been named “slow blogs.”

The homepage could then also recirculate these articles with different headlines as the week progressed.

The slow blogs were a powerful subscriber converter for The Age and also had strong subscriber retention and engagement.

The Australian Financial Review had a similar approach to this slower-paced live coverage. However, instead of covering a particular electorate, it had two slow blogs throughout the election period focused on policies and campaign colour. Both resonated with subscribers.

Expert verdicts

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age first experimented with a “verdicts” format as part of the federal budget coverage as a way to aggregate analysis and opinion pieces in one easy-to-find destination for readers.

The format features special author embeds with the journalist’s headshot and title, as well as some short copy linking out to the full articles.

This format provided an opportunity for our mastheads to “own” political coverage by demonstrating our strong expertise in the space.

During the election, the verdict format was an ideal showcase for our post-debate coverage and allowed our audiences to have their opinions validated or challenged by our experts. These pieces were equally popular among both subscribers and non-subscribers.

Election results page

On the day of the election, the newsrooms, with the support of our product and tech teams, switched on both an election counter widget and results page which took in data from the Australian Electoral Commission.

Once the polls closed and the count began, the results page started to display live data and a projection on whether a seat would be won or lost. This information was used in our seat counter widget, which ran at the top of the Web site and on every federal politics story. This same counter also indicated at which point a party would be able to form government.

The results page was popular with both subscribers and new audiences, with many readers drawn to the site to discover the latest counts.

Each individual electorate could be embedded in both our live coverage and any subsequent analysis focused on the results. It was helpful to readers who were fixated on the result of their own seat, but also for political junkies who wanted a holistic glance at how election night was progressing.

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