February Traffic a Little Bit Better

Page views for theorion.com since December 2015. Click for a closer view.

February analytics for theorion.com shows the website continues to gain back the traffic it lost last semester when a series of problems knocked the site off-line or slowed it down for more than a month.

Of course, it's difficult to compare months to months when students were on campus for the full month of February but only a few weeks in December and a couple of weeks in January. Here are the numbers for all three:

Page views:
February - 65,782
January - 28,435
December - 30,971

Unique Visitors:
February - 29,188
January - 13,438
December - 14,180

A better measure might be averaging the days each month when students were actually on campus.

Page views per day in weeks when classes are in session:
February - 2,268
January - 1,964
December - 1,283

That last set of numbers shows The Orion website is reclaiming its lost audience. Another hopeful sign is the increase in the number of people downloading the mobile app:

Total number of app downloads:
August 10 - 521
December 2 - 1,003
March 5 - 1,251

App page views totaled 9,088 in February.

Here are the five most viewed stories on theorion.com last month:
Chico State journalism student dies - 7,342 page views
Rape trail no more - 4,418
Chico voted sixth romantic city in America - 2,035
Man shoots himself at Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity - 878
Biggie, Tupac can rest assured - 822

Welcome back!

Orion editors at work Tuesday on the Poynter coaching exercise.

Another semester of The Orion kicked off Tuesday with the first day of Oriontation. Editors attended sessions about coaching, brainstorming story ideas and the importance of high-impact images for stories. They also heard about my word for the semester: Urgency. Doing good work and getting it in front of the audience as soon as possible is one way the paper could really improve this semester.

Since yesterday, I found three items about managing I thought I'd pass along:

From the Poynter Institute: 25 Ideas Nonprofit Newsrooms Can't Afford to Ignore
This piece is written for newsrooms at nonprofit news organizations, but the tips apply just as much to student newsrooms. Lots of great advice here about focusing on the audience and diversifying where your money comes from.

Another from Poynter: What Defines a Healthy Newsroom Culture
Roy Peter Clark discusses what makes a workplace great for creative people in the news business. The Orion is that kind of place in several important ways, but there are also some things that could be improved.

Design for the new square-tab format for the print edition
I think the smaller format The Orion is moving to this semester can be designed to get more readers to pick up the paper, but it's hard to find good examples of covers done in this format done well. The Emory Wheel might be a place to look for inspiration. Here's its front page from today:

End-of-Semester Celebration

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 

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.

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. 

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.