Website visitors exceed 15,000

Last month, theorion.com hit an important benchmark when the number of unique visitors to the site exceeded 15,000. That's triple the number of copies The Orion prints every Wednesday.

Maybe more impressive is the number of page views to the site in February, 443,997. That's way more than double the traffic last September (200,101) when the new Orion website went online.

These analytics from The Orion's hosting service don't tell why the numbers are increasing so quickly, but it's fair to say that more readers generally are going to the Web to get their news and theorion.com is doing a good job of providing it. I believe the successful transition to putting new content on the site daily is what's responsible for the dramatic growth this semester.

Another statistic, I think, shows this. In the 41,608 visits to the site (2.62 visits per unique visitor) in February, 10.67 pages were viewed on average. The BBC News website, one of the best and most popular in the world, gets between three and four pages on average.

Congratulations, Orionites!

Let the Web be the Web

Wednesday's edition of The Orion had a nicely packaged feature assembled by Sergio Sanchez about the seniors on Chico State's men's and women's basketball teams. In it, Sergio wrote capsule descriptions of what each player had accomplished this season followed by quotations from each (two were missing) about his or her most memorable moment accompanied by photos with player position and hometown.

This half-page of photos and text is so much more readable than the typical 15-inch slab of text about the departing seniors, so I was surprised to see the same feature on theorion.com looking like a newspaper feature story.

With a little thought and a little more work, the version that ran in the ink-and-paper edition could have been constructed. But the Web offers lots of other possibilities (think of The Daily Prophet, the newspaper with photos that move, from the Harry Potter books and movies). Source: bahtmun.tumblr.com

Or wouldn't it be fun to see and hear embedded Vine, Tout or InstaGram videos instead of photos on the newsprint version of Sergio's feature?

How about screen-wide videos or photos of each player that animate when a reader scrolls down a page? It might look something like this from Pitchfork, a British magazine.

Click to read the entire scrolling story.

I'll bet you can come up with a half-dozen other ways to present the information. Think about those the next time you're planning a story the Web.

CCMA Awards: Judges' comments

Here are judges' comments about awards The Orion won in the 2013 California College Media Association contest:

General Excellence - 1st place

"The news content in the Orion is strong. The paper attempts to move the needle and goes after things like a bad police chief, problems for Chico police, unsolved sexual assaults, as well as smaller issues like lice. It had true enterprise, and some of its watchdog work is “breaking” thanks to its reporting. Strong sourcing distinguished several of these stories and the excellent use of graphics helped break out critical information. Its Opinion pages are extremely strong. Masterful cartoons/illustrations combined with a nice, heavy font give the pages a distinctly professional look and feel. The editorial writing lives up to the design with clear, often strongly worded pieces on relevant topics that are often covered in the news section. Personal columnists take some interesting angles – like suggesting that arresting a student for being drunk in public is less effective than sending him home to sleep. The Sports section had nice variety with some enterprise on the grueling schedule of a cross-country runner, the athletic department’s new social media strategy, and an outside the-box sport called “slacking.” The basketball preview page is also a nice service to readers. This is also a well-designed paper with effective use of fonts and excellent use of space. Nothing here is oversized. There were a few places the paper stumbled with clichéd writing, recurring features that miss the mark, and stories that read like press releases, but these were exceptions to an otherwise solid publication."

Overall design - 3rd place

"Strong typography and headline hierarchy work well with visuals throughout the sections."

Breaking News Story - 2nd place - Pedro Quintana
"Police arrest Chico man on suspicion of sexual assault, kidnappings"

"Compelling lede, lots of original reporting, also added safety tips and info to make it more forward-looking and useful to readers."

Editorial - 2nd place
No comments.

Sports Story - 1st place - Nick Woodard
"Sights Set on Rio"

"Using an informative yet simple writing style, this story of a blind runner tells itself in a way that keeps you reading. The writer had an uncanny ability to answer each and every question you might have at the exact moment you would ask it. The story also avoids the total feel-good atmosphere some writers might try for by pointing out the discrimination and other non-visual difficulties that can crop up. There are just the right number of voices in the story to tell a tale that is smart in its brevity but long on insight and information."

Photo Illustration - 2nd place - Logan Missner, Jessica Amaro and Scott Ledbetter
"Downhill Daredevil"

"Good use of photography, strong display type with good informational insets. A high impact illustration."

Sports Page Design - 1st place - Scott Ledbetter and Jessica Amaro
Downhill Daredevil

"Fun, energetic page (judge stopped to read it!). This is what makes a page successful: You stop, notice it, and read it."

Headline Writing - 2nd place - Brett Appley

"Especially liked: @ChicoState uses power of #socialmedia to connect fans, school sports."

Infographic - 1st place - Robert Harris and Scott Ledbetter
"Covered California"

"In a world where hardly anyone understands the new health-care coverage brought on by Obamacare, this weekly student paper created a flow chart to help explain just what students need to know or do to be covered. A wonderful idea and brilliantly written. I wish I had thought of doing this. Superb work."

Cartoon - 1st place - Liz Coffee
"Dangers on Drunken Students"

"A strong "Scared Straight"-style public service message. Holds students accountable for the consequences of their behavior."

Storify of San Diego awards

Fixing photo

The Orion photo staff had an outstanding week last week. Just look at this photo by Maisee Lee that played at the top of a feature about retired ag and biology professor Wes Dempsey. Nice composition, great use of selective focus, great expression on her subject's face.

So it's clear to me the staff has talent.

What isn't clear is why there aren't more photos like this, and more photos generally, in the newspaper and on the website.

I've come to know over the years this isn't a problem unique to The Orion.

Part of the trouble is the way photos are assigned. Like a lot of papers, The Orion depends on writers and editors (whose primary concern is words, not pictures) to make photo requests, an order for an image or images to illustrate a story. Then it's up to a photo editor to schedule one of the staff photographers to bring back something appropriate.

On a good day, the photographer and reporter go together to the assignment, talk about the story before they arrive, share ideas about what images might best match the yet-to-be-written text and even talk about the art after the story is written.

Unfortunately, that doesn't happen often enough. And even if it did, that's really a system designed for a print newsroom instead of one that produces stories for multiple platforms, which usually means the media organization needs many, many more images than can be assigned under this system, not to mention video when it's the best way to tell a story.

Suggestions

If "more" and "better" are on The Orion's wish list for photojournalism, here are some suggestions for how to make that happen:

Collaborative assignments - Instead of filling out a photo assignment after a story gets a green light at the weekly ed board meeting, invite the photo editor and even photographers to sit in and join the discussion when stories are pitched. They can help the other editors decide if a story should be just a photo and cutline, a page of photos, a slideshow or something else other than a photo-with-story. This approach works especially well when whole pages are planned at the initial story meeting (the Maestro approach) instead of at the end of a news assembly line.

Photo of the day - Wild art (photos not connected to a specific story) can be a wonderful addition to a website, a life-saver on layout-day deadline and a great opportunity to show readers and website visitors that The Orion is covering the campus...every day! Whether it's a photo of a planned event or something a photographer (or reporter) sees walking across campus, in Bidwell Park or downtown, having a fresh image on the website every day is a goal worth having.

Photo essays - Just as writers should be free to develop their own story ideas and projects, photographers should be encouraged to cover an event, a process or even a person through photos. Here's why:
• Readers love photo pages and slideshows when they're done well.
• Photojournalists expand their skill sets and portfolios.
• Photojournalists have an opportunity to express their creativity.
• Bonus: Both the paper and the website benefit from having a greater variety of visuals on their pages.

All three of these suggestions require a new way of managing the photo staff -- change that can be difficult. Enforcing the new responsibilities, though, will be crucial to doing it successfully.  

A home page ready for contest

Orion Managing Editor Ernesto Rivera has apparently been putting in major hours tinkering with the home page at theorion.com because it looks amazing. He's replaced some of the template section styles lower on the page and took a figurative screw driver to tighten up the opening page.

The image that fills the screen when visitors navigate to the site now shows two or three main stories on the left news-section module with little unnecessary white space. The photo gallery controls are still being unreliable about whether they're going to kick into a second line and create too much white space above the photo scroll, but otherwise all the elements work together to present an economic and extremely newsy "front page."

The big changes, though, happen down the page. Look at how the new arts and sports modules are configured.

Both use a representative photo under the section name to announce the type of content visitors are likely to see when they access this part of the page. The photo is flanked by the most recent four stories from the section.

Arts is actually a new addition to the home page, and the right-most position in this new module displays an important addition, the calendar, which has now moved from the print edition to online. The move makes great sense because the events listing can be updated daily instead of once a week. Arts Editor Nicole Santos deserves credit for making the calendar a focal point of the section.

The sports module isn't new, but it does employ a new style that also brings consistency to the lower half of the home page. The right-most column in this section is devoted to Tweets from the sports staff, showing off breaking game and match coverage that the section's followers have been enjoying only on Twitter, a strength of the section and its reporters.

This tweaking of the website comes just in time for the Associated Collegiate Press convention in San Diego at the end of the month and the national Pacemaker competition for college websites. I think the changes boost The Orion's chances of taking home some impressive awards this spring!

Two-question quiz

1. What's wrong with this section of today's home page?

2. How would you fix it?

(For answers, see the post below.)