Want a model for how to write a lede?

At critique a few weeks ago, we took a look at the ledes in the newspaper and tried rewriting some to make them more:
• accurate
• clear
• to the point
• compelling

So as I started reading the San Francisco Chronicle's story this morning about uneven punishment for sexual harassment at UC Berkeley ("Disparity in UC discipline"), I knew I had to post the first few paragraphs of Annette Asimov's story as a model. Hers is a well-reported but complicated, multi-sourced story that could have been tough to summarize and get into.

Here's the top:

UC Berkeley has a clear system in place for investigating employees accused of sexually harassing students or colleagues— but a gaping hole exists when it comes to disciplining the rule-breakers.

Punishment is often arbitrary.

The issue of capricious discipline has emerged as a big problem at the premier public university as cases have mounted.

Four highly paid employees whose violations of the University of California's sexual harassment policy came to light in the last year all received different punishments: an astronomy professor got a warning, the dean of the law school had his pay temporarily reduced and was told to apologize, a vice chancellor had to resign that position but was given another high-profile job two months later, and an assistant coach -- the lowest-paid and the only one without tenure -- was immediately fired.

Look at what Asimov does here:
• The basic story is summed up in the first paragraph: Policy is in Place - BUT - There's a Problem
• Second paragraph: PUNCH, four words, THE PROBLEM (the heart of the story).
• Next, a sentence to put the story in context.
• Then straight to the specifics, the evidence, that the university has not done what it says it does. And what a great twist at the end of this long paragraph to provide the "why" of the story: the powerful don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else.

Asimov has been writing and reporting for a long time, and she has won several awards. If you're looking for a reporter to emulate, she would be a great choice.

Steady (But Disappointing) Web Traffic Last Week

Traffic on theorion.com seems to have settled in to a predictable 60,000 page views a month, and last week's traffic mirrored that rate. That's disappointing. I would have expected a serious traffic bump on Wednesday when the CSU Board of Trustees announced the appointment of a new president for Chico State.

The website did get about 1,000 more visitors than the previous day, so the audience is showing up when news breaks. With a terrific effort on the part of the news teams to Tweet the announcement, post something quickly on Facebook and get a story up quickly and then follow with two more stories the same morning, I expected much more traffic for the announcement.

A few guesses about why:
• Both the CSU system office and Chico State's public information office had full press releases available almost the moment the decision was announced, and Chico State's was emailed to the campus.
• The Chico E-R had a good, complete story up soon after the announcement (though only minutes ahead of The Orion's story).
• The Orion didn't run its best piece of exclusive content: A recorded interview with the president-elect.
• Students, The Orion's primary audience, isn't that interested in who will be running the university.

The appointment wasn't even the most-viewed story of the week. Here are the top 5:
1. Lake Oroville rises to the occasion - 2,202 page views
2. Students caught in crossfire of CFA strike - 458
3. Board of Trustees announces new Chico State president - 411
4. Opinion: Big boobs, big problems - 303
5. Arts: Fuller House shouldn't get an fuller - 289

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.