Katrina Cameron will be The Orion EIC next semester

Katrina Cameron has been named The Orion's editor-in-chief for spring semester 2014. She and Quinn Western, the current managing editor, interviewed for the paper's top editorial position yesterday.

Katrina Cameron

Katrina has been the higher ed and health care reporter at the Chico Enterprise-Record since last summer. She was a reporter and features editor at The Orion last school year.

Her interest in working at the paper started before she ever set foot on campus.

"Leading Chico State’s nationally recognized student newspaper has been a personal dream since my stepbrother brought home a copy while visiting during his first semester of college," she wrote in her letter of application. "I was only 16 years old when I first flipped through those pages, but already I knew I would become an Orionite in the future."

Congratulations, Katrina!

Audience builds for theorion.com and app

The October numbers for The Orion website and mobile app show a growing audience that spends lots of time looking at lots of content.

According to analytics gathered by the paper's web hosting service, BlueHost:
• 11,557 individuals viewed theorion.com last month.
• They viewed 336,674 pages in 31,349 visits, or 10.74 pages per visit (the rate for BBC.com, one of the most popular news websites in the world, is around 3.2 pages per visit, according to the BBC's own estimates).
• The number of unique visitors was slightly down from September, but visits, page views and hits were all higher.

The mobile app, according to host iCampusTimes:
• was downloaded by 465 people in October, bringing the total to a more than 1,800.
• attracted 676 individual viewers in October compared with 472 in September.
• had 2,670 total visits compared with 1,966 in September.

The most popular category on the mobile app in October was "Offers" with 1,849, probably because of the iPad giveaway contest. News was the most popular category in September with 1,048 visits, but news attracted about 200 more viewers in October, 1,246.

How the Huffington Post Does Digital

Video from the Reynolds Journalism Lab at the University of Missouri:

 

What mobile phone users want next

Here's part of an infographic from the InfographicList website that shows smart phone users want to be able to do more with their phones.

I'm posting because we had a conversation two weeks ago at The Orion management meeting about how advertisers just don't seem to be interested in the digital-couponing function (Offers) in the Orion mobile app. I wonder if they've seen this infographic.

New Website Makes a Splash in New Orleans

The Orion's new website took second place in the best-of-show competition in its circulation category this weekend at the CMA/ACP national convention in New Orleans. That's two places better than it did last spring at the midwinter convention in San Francisco.

It's hard to know what contest judges considered, but I'd guess the hard news effort of theorion.com is what pushed it near the top of its category. I didn't see another site in any category that presented the quantity and quality of news The Orion does.

First place went to The Weal of SAIT Polytechnic in Calgary. Just guessing, of course, but I'd have to say the The Weal's photography is what helped it claim the top spot. The images on the site are just outstanding, and the editors clearly play to that strength by devoting the top of their home page to photos.

Here's a list of the other website winners (with links) from the convention:

Website Enrollment Level 1

Bells, Univ. of Mary Hardin-Baylor, Waco, Texas

http://thebells.umhb.edu

Website Enrollment Level 2

The Banner, California Baptist Univ., Riverside, Calif.

http://cbubanner.com

Website Enrollment Level 4

1. The Mace & Crown, Old Dominion Univ., Norfolk, Va.
http://www.maceandcrown.com

Moving Up With the Mobile App

In the past 30 days, news (Channel 1) and opinion (Channel 2) have been the most popular choices for visitors to The Orion mobile app site.

Keaton Bass, Quinn Western and I got an update Thursday from iCampusTimes CEO Tim Roberts about new features coming to The Orion's mobile app.

We learned that users will soon be able to call up a campus map on their phone, redeem digital coupons with the swipe of a finger and get push notices for breaking news, among other services. Students who click on an ad inside the app will be able to see an advertiser's website and even call the business with a single finger tap!

I can't help it: I get excited when I see the possibilities of mobile for the paper. More and more of the audience for news and information is headed for phones and tablets, and The Orion is in the vanguard of college newspapers making the transition.

Slightly more than 1,500 people have downloaded the app since its launch last year, about 500 in the past two months thanks in large part to the paper's PR team of Rachael DiCicco, Nabila Larohl, Amanda Locke and Megan Vanderford. They're hoping their latest promotion -- a raffle for a free iPad -- will push the download number over 3,000 yet this semester.

As the app audience grows, the ad staff will be able to add dollars from mobile ad sales to the revenue that comes now from selling ads in the paper-and-ink Orion. That will help make the paper greener in two ways: improve its financial bottom line and allow it to print fewer physical papers in the future.

Top Tips for (and from) Investigative Journalists

This collection of tips from investigative reporters was put together by the IACC Young Journalists Initiative and reported by the journalism.co.uk blog. My favorite quotation: "When you meet people, you've got to say 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me?'"