Monthly listings of all the sentencings that take place within the county always does quite well on CambridgeshireLive. They provide our readers with the option of reading about every single case all in one story with key bits of information rather than having them spread out across the website, usually raking in thousands of page views for our site.

Knowing how well these types of stories do, I decided I would do the monthly roundup for June 2023. Normally, I don’t usually write listicles in stories unless they’re What’s On pieces so before I started writing and getting the details I needed, I thought it would be useful to take a look at past pieces to see how we’ve approached them in the past and to give me ideas on how I was going to do my story, in terms of page formatting, sentence structure and the pictures used.

Once I had these ideas in my head, I then scrolled through the list of sentences from the past month so I could compile them in a list. My main worry was that re-publishing details of these cases would not cover us under qualified privilege as the reports would no longer be contemporaneous due to some of them taking place long before the report being published and the writing up of the article,

To make sure, I only included brief details from each case and provided a link back to the original story that we had written up. This was important in giving context to the readers as they could find out more information for themselves if they wanted to.

In total, there were 31 people who had been sentenced for a wide range of crimes, including drug dealing, sexual assault and paedophilia among others. I rounded them all up in the article, with the majority of them containing their mugshots and it was later published on to our site.

The story did relatively well among our readers, garnering 5,000 page views within the first few hours of publication. Stories like these show how important different styles of journalism are as some readers may prefer to read stories in longform or as a feature, while others would rather read listicles of things on a variety of subjects, therefore giving them a choice of what they want to view and makes stories like these worth doing.