Stories on the East West Rail project consistently do well on CambridgeshireLive and as part of our plans to boost audience engagement to our site, I thought it would be a good idea to do a poll, asking our readers whether or not they thought that the proposed railway line from Cambridge to Oxford would be beneficial or not. I knew that a large chunk of our audience had strong opinions on this topic and would interact with the story so we knew that the question would generate a lot of response.

Before creating the story that would contain the poll, I did some background research on the project to get an overview of the key facts as well as get a sense of what the general public’s views were. I had written stories about the proposed railway line in the past, including opposition from campaign groups as well as updates and announcements, so I did have some prior knowledge.

However, I wanted make sure that I had the right details so that the overall tone of the piece was not one sided as there was bound to be a vast range of views. Doing all of this shows how crucial it is to research stories, even if you have done work on it before as by doing this, it can open up different angles, make the story clearer, find potential follow ups, and provide the appropriate balance to the debate.

After getting the initial story published, there were some technical problems with the poll only showing half of its content, but this was fixed after it was flagged to the newsdesk. We also received an e-mail from the company, asking us to put a link about the project in the article, which we were happy to do so our readers could make their own minds up.

Once the story was published, the initial poll piece did very well among our readers, with thousands of interactions on Twitter and Facebook, as well as a high engagement time and a wide range of responses. Statistics like these prove that our audience enjoys these types of stories and having their opinions heard, which applies to not just this project, but other similar polls that have been published on our site that have also proved successful.

We would later adapt people’s views on the project into two separate pieces, which involved breakouts on the actual results of the poll and people’s comments. As these were both completely different from one another, it felt it would be best to do them to help paint the whole picture of whether our readers thought the project was a good thing and to avoid complaints regarding bias.