Thursday, December 17, 2015

End-of-Semester Celebration

Orion End-of-Semester Gathering - Fall 2015
Open the slideshow

Here are the awards presented Wednesday at The Orion's end-of-semester celebration. Congratulations to the winners and to everyone who helped send this fall's publications out into the world.

BEST COPY EDITOR - Jesse Demercurio 

PR SUPERSTAR - Marlena Weiss 

BEST OPINION WRITER - Elizabeth Ernster  

BEST ILLUSTRATOR - Adriana Macias 

BEST BREAKING NEWS WRITER - Carly Plemons 

BEST ENTERPRISE NEWS WRITER - Austin Herbaugh 

BEST DESIGNER - Sarah Pope 

BEST SPORTS WRITER - Nick Martinez 

BEST FEATURES WRITER - Grace Kerfoot

BEST ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT WRITER - George Johnston 

BEST PHOTOGRAPHER - John Domogma 

BEST VIDEOGRAPHER - Joseph Mares  

ROOKIE OF THE SEMESTER - Michael Catelli 

SUNSHINE AWARD - Jason Spies 

BEST EDITOR - Stephanie Schmieding 

BEST OF SPECIAL SECTIONS -Kayce Tynan

ORION AWARD - Haley Rodriguez 

Monday, December 7, 2015

Tips for Engaging Millennials



I found this Soundcloud presentation of a Journalismnews narrowcast the other day and though the key points weren't specifically about student journalism, I thought the producers made some great points about 18-30 year olds and their media preferences.

The highlights for student journos:
• YouTube is an important gateway to other content, and YouTube analytics -- what gets audience attention -- should be used as a guide to content creation.
• Millennials will follow a YouTube trail to an originating website.
• Attention spans are short in the contemporary news cycle, so stories created as a reaction to other events have to be posted in hours, not days. The shelf-life of a story vastly shorter than it used to be.
• The audience wants to co-create content, and news organizations need to find ways to make that happen.
• Millennials have a fear of missing out (FOMO), so they're interested in event coverage that involves them and their peers. Stories should include coverage of the audience, and the audience will promote those stories with hashtags identifying themselves and their friends, driving traffic.
• Millennials are interested in local news because they think of themselves as good citizens and good neighbors. They recognize that local events affect their families.
• Successful news organizations pay attention to analytics so they can stay on top of what millennials want to see, hear and read.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Mobile app reaches 1,000 downloads



The Orion's public relations team has achieved one of its most important goals this fall: 1,000 downloads of the paper's mobile app.

Taylor Sinclair's group relied mostly on social media -- primarily Twitter -- to encourage students to download the app. They convinced almost 400 people to put the app on their Apple and Android phones in three months.

Not surprisingly, traffic on the app increased right along with the number of users.


The number of page views rose to almost 5,000, with a predictable dip over Thanksgiving break. Connectivity problems affected the number of updates starting in the middle of the month or traffic probably would have been even stronger.

Those same problems also depressed the number of visitors, visits and page views to theorion.com main website last month.




After a healthy October, the various problems on the site drove the number of page views below 300,000 and eventually kept people from even navigating to the site (or turned them away when they attempted to arrive via social media). The new Orion staff is going to have to work extra hard to raise its number of unique visitors from 26,000 in November to a more typical 40,000 per month.

One change that should help was the student management team's decision just before Thanksgiving break to switch to a new web hosting system. The website has a new look and, I hope, a more reliable platform.

The new version of theorion.com was unveiled Monday.