Friday, November 18, 2016

Carly Plemons named EIC for Spring 2017

Carly Plemons
Carly Plemons, a junior from Temecula, California, will be The Orion's editor-in-chief next semester.

Carly has worked as a reporter on the paper's breaking news team, a writer for the arts and entertainment section and this semester was the arts and entertainment section editor. She helped develop an Orion radio show this fall on KCSC campus radio.

We had three excellent applicants for the paper's top editorial position. In her interview, Carly emphasized strengthening all the paper's platforms and proposed some exciting changes for theorion.com.

Congratulations, Carly!


Wednesday, November 2, 2016

October numbers are bad news


October analytics for theorion.com showed nothing but red ink for site traffic. Sessions, pageviews and time on site were all down compared to September. While traffic was still above average, remember that average includes the summer months when the site attracts very few visitors.

Chart from Quill Engage
The Quill Engage report the paper gets each week and month included some numbers that might help sort out the problem:
• Mobile, tablet and desktop sessions were all down from the month prior. Desktop sessions represented the most traffic; mobile visits had the most in September.
• New-user numbers were up, but the newcomers tended to spend less time on the site. That means people who came to the website to read a particular story didn't stick around to read more. One way to keep them longer is to add hyperlinks to stories that send readers to related content on the site.
• At the same time, referrals were down. Redoubling the social-media effort would help turn that around.
• About 55 percent of site traffic came from search engines, about the same level as September. That number could get bigger with more attention to writing headlines that contain keywords.
• While page views were down, people who came to the site actually read more pages than the month before. That may sound like it contradicts the previous point, but I think October represented a return to last year when a large group of regular readers were using theorion.com like a traditional newspaper, navigating to the home page and looking for stories to read. Promoting the website could help grow that core group and improve traffic overall.

My own opinion, based on four years of looking at numbers like these, is that the lack of strong breaking and enterprise news stories is behind the slump. Traditionally, those sorts of stories have been the big driver of traffic to theorion.com, but few of those stories appeared on the website in October and fewer were among the top 10 stories viewed. I do think, though, that livening up the sports and arts and entertainment efforts to take advantage of the web -- more video, more nontraditional storytelling, as we discussed in section critiques the past several weeks -- would also help.

This would be a good discussion for the next ed board meeting.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

End-of-October Surprise



After a couple of weeks of poor numbers, traffic on theorion.com rebounded last week to end October on a high note. Traffic on all devices was up the past seven days, with mobile taking the lead.

The bump started Wednesday and continued for a couple of days, I suspect because visitors were looking for news about Halloween in Chico. A review of "The Girl on the Train" by Anisha Brady provided the most traffic of the week (and of the month!) with about 1,200 views by this morning. Because that story's bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who come to the website to view just that story) was about 95 percent, it's likely the traffic came from Google search or a link to the review posted on another website.

Page views for the month were 38,594, down from 52,040 in September.

The number of visits to theorion.com jumped this past week.
Here are the top stories from last Tuesday through Monday:
The Girl on the Train a Thrilling Ride - 1,181
Letter to the Editor - 374
Virginity an Important Milestone - 311
Art Tour Reveals Hidden Gems of School - 171
Full Disclosure: Athletes Getting Paid - 139
Live Halloween Coverage - 139
Candidates Running for Chico City Council - 134
Chico State Ranked Among Best Schools in California - 127
Race Relations are Moving Backward - 122