Stephanie Schmieding named EIC for spring semester

Stephanie Schmieding, The Orion's enterprise news editor, has been named the paper's editor-in-chief for spring semester 2016.

Stephanie has been on the staff three semesters, working first as a feature writer, then features editor and this semester as editor for non-breaking news stories.

Her platform for spring is to refocus the paper's efforts on its digital platforms, where most of The Orion's readership goes for its news. She plans to shuffle editorial positions to put more people in roles directly related to The Orion mobile app and theorion.com.

Stephanie, who's from the Bay Area, will graduate this spring.

At long last, website fixed

As of 8:35 last night, theorion.com returned to its newsy, speedy self after the paper purchased a new cloud hosting package from BlueHost, our web hosting company, that added capacity and a sexy new caching function. Gone (I hope forever) are the 30-second home page loads and database connection error screens.

What an awful month!

Just how important the website is to the rest of The Orion's operations became painfully apparent as the website stayed broken for most of October. Because I think it's important for everyone on the staff to know what happened and what was done to cure the problem, here's the month in a nutshell:
• On Oct. 8, BlueHost took down the website for terms of service violations. The website had too many connections, which triggered the shutdown. I removed the Twitter feed at their recommendation, and they agreed to put the site back up.
• Later that day, I paid BlueHost $99 to optimize the site. Not the solution.
• We suspected the tens of thousands of spambot comments that had been building on the site might have been the cause, so Web Editor Matt Nachtigal deleted all comments from the site. Still no improvement. He also added a captcha plugin to stop the bots.
• Our friends at Camayak noticed that The Orion's entire copy-process system wasn't working because of the errors and let us know. They also suggested shutting down Camayak to cut down on editor frustration :-)
• More calls to BlueHost support. No help and no resolution.
• The public relations team -- tasked with doing a better job of using social media -- found it had nothing to promote because stories weren't being posted on the website.
• I dove into the backend of the site one morning and noticed many image files larger than 1 megabyte. I immediately pulled them down, optimized them to be no more than 100k, and put them back up. Editors were reminded to optimize photos.
• Editor Risa Johnson then took the drastic step of pulling down all the site's images and asked section editors to optimize them and reload them through Camayak. That resulted in fewer errors, but the site was still slow and still throwing database connection errors.
• Ad manager Cortnee Uriz expressed concern at a Big 5 management meeting that site difficulties were threatening business and new ads that were set to come online Nov. 1.
• Another call to BlueHost support. They assured me everything that could be done to the database had been done and said the error was with WordPress. When I went on WordPress discussion forums, I found others with the same problem but no solution.
• Last weekend, I Googled "WordPress repair" and requested quotes from three companies to solve the problem. I hired one of them Monday morning.
• Report from quickwebsitefix.com: malware detected (the site had been hacked).
• Follow-up report: The errors were triggered by high use of the database.
• I called BlueHost support, described the problem, and this time the support person suggested that the intermittent nature of the database errors indicated capacity issues. He suggested an upgrade to cloud hosting, which would give theorion.com more resources (capacity) and smarter caching. I paid for two years of cloud hosting.
• The website was migrated from its old server last night. Risa Johnson reported speedy loads later that evening. Problem apparently solved.
I plan to ask quickwebsitefix to clean up the malware and make other repairs. Going forward, I'm hoping the section editors will take the time today and tomorrow to put the optimized images back online and Matt to do what he can to upgrade the WordPress theme and other plugins to head off any further problems.

Thanks, everyone, for your patience. I'm hoping one upside to all these problems is understanding how crucial the website is to The Orion's mission. Be aware that the focus of your work needs to shift back to theorion.com and keeping the site fresh and up to date.

Traffic Up Despite Crazy Month

It hasn't been a great month at theorion.com.

Instead of seeing The Orion home page when they navigated to the website, visitors were greeted with the (bad) news that a database connection couldn't be made. Reloading (sometimes several times) allowed access to the home page and the rest of the website, but after hours of investigation, chats with the paper's hosting service and advice from some smart people, the problem persisted.

The site is a little better now, but it looks as if the paper will have to hire an outside tech to fix the site, which one repair company guessed was probably hacked.

The good news?

Even with all the hurdles, the audience still made its way to the website, which recorded its best traffic month all year.

The numbers:
65,347 individuals visited during October.
They viewed 241,216 pages during 642,405 visits (a respectable 2.66 pages per visit).
The number of unique visitors was a record.
The number of visits was greater than the total of all visits to the website in 2014.

Spambots, which left tens of thousands of junk comments on the website (now cleaned up), made more than 3 million visits to the site, though those are not counted in the traffic numbers provided by BlueHost, The Orion's web-hosting service.

Because of the attacks and hacks, the numbers don't necessarily represent legitimate traffic to the site. This month (November) things should settle down and get back to normal once the site is repaired.

Website Numbers Up, App Numbers Way Up

Page views for The Orion mobile app in September

Most of the traffic numbers for theorion.com and its mobile app were up in September compared to the same month a year ago. The most dramatic growth was for the app.

A year ago in September, the Orion app had 5,123 monthly page views, 1,537 individual viewing sessions (launches) and 1,067 unique visitors.

This year, those numbers were 21,818, 4,367 and 799. That's four times as many pages.

The Orion website had 41,443 unique visitors in September compared to 30,448 in the same month in 2014, a substantial gain. But page views were much higher a year ago: 814,405 in 2015, 474,252 last month, according to analytics from the paper's web hosting service, BlueHost.

The difference is clear in a statistic called pages per visit. Last year, a person would look at almost 11 pages, on average, every time he or she visited the website. This year, that number is a more-typical 2.6 pages per visit. I interpret that as indicating visitors are finding less that's interesting on the whole website after they arrive, a problem for The Orion.

Besides growth in visitors and the astounding growth for the app, another good indicator in this month's numbers was an evening-out of the traffic over the course of a week.

Before last month, visitors generally opened up theorion.com on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, when a lot of new content was posted to the website. This past month, though, the biggest page-view traffic days were Saturday and Sunday, which used to be the slowest days. I'm guessing that means the staff's efforts to spread out posts and keep more fresh content on the website is paying off.

The analytics also show that visitors to the website still mostly get there (88.5% of visits) by typing in http://theorion.com or by clicking a bookmark for The Orion. Visitors from other sites, including Facebook and Twitter, made up just 4.2 percent of the traffic. So, there's still more work to do using social media to drive traffic to the website.

Hard news attracted the most traffic to theorion.com last month. Here are the three most popular stories:
Faculty Voice Frustrations With Zingg Administration - 32, 413 page views
Amy Winehouse Documentary: What Her Family Didn't Want You To See - 5,841 views
Salamander Slithers into Sutter Dining Salad - 4,032 views (and 197 comments on Reddit)

Two stories from last spring actually did better than the Winehouse column and the Sutter Dining story, but it appears much of the traffic for those stories came from spammers who invaded the comments for those posts. This has become a real problem that the web editor needs to address, probably by using a spambot-blocking plugin that verifies a user is a human.

Mobile App is Attracting Attention

A push by The Orion PR team and timely updates by a new manager have revived interest in the paper's mobile app.

Taylor Sinclair's team ran a contest in mid-September that gave away tickets to the Taste of Chico if users would download the app and tweet at the @theorion_news account. The day the winners were announced was the single highest day for page views in the history of the app -- almost 7,000!

The number of people who had downloaded the app also increased, from 521 at the end of the summer to 710 by the end of this week. The rate of downloads doubled from about two a day to more than four.

All those extra eyeballs had an effect on overall traffic, too. Page views for the month were 20,783 compared to the average monthly number of views from the previous 12 months of 4,000. Even taking away the blip from the day the contest results were announced, that's still a 10,000-page-view increase.

Some of that increase might have been the result of design and content tweaks by new app manager Esmeralda Ramirez, a former Orion online editor. She introduced a new eye-catching theme and expanded the menu to offer readers access to more features and services.

If you haven't yet, you can download The Orion mobile app here.

Newspaper Distribution 101

There's a right way and a wrong way to distribute The Orion to news racks around campus. This photo shows the wrong way.

Photo by Lars Gustafson

Here's the right way:
1. Check the delivery sheet to make sure you're dropping the correct number of bundles at each site.
2. Pick up any issues of the previous week's papers and recycle them.
3. Take the plastic ties from around the bundle or bundles you're dropping off and throw them away.
4. Put the new papers top-of-front-page facing up on the rack.

When you've delivered all the papers, return your wire cart to the office and let the office manager know if you had any problems or any racks are damaged or vandalized.

(Some weeks, the public relations staff may ask for a count of papers remaining on racks. Be sure to take the time to count them accurately before you recycle.)

Also, not all the people who signed up to deliver papers the last two weeks showed up at 7:30 to take their turn distributing the copies around campus. When someone misses a shift, others have to be called in to do their work. So.... show up when you're scheduled.

The Importance of Art With Every Story

                     THIS?                    OR                    THIS?