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?                                                                 

Bump from Sutter Salamander Helps September Traffic

Online traffic is back on track at theorion.com thanks, in part, to a nice bit of spot-news reporting about a reptile photographed in a salad at Sutter Dining.

Michael Catelli's story, which was posted a half-hour before noon Friday, had attracted more than 3,000 page views in four days, pushing visits to the website to 3,652 for the day it was posted, almost 1,100 more than the day before.

It was by far the most viewed story of the week.

Visits to theorion.com for the first week of September stood at just under 20,000 compared to about 14,274 during the same week last year. So, after a slow start, the website is now ahead of year-ago numbers for visits, though page views are still running way behind.

Some other interesting first-week-of-September numbers (from web hosting service BlueHost):
• Bucking a national trend, theorion.com still gets almost all of its traffic from people who go there directly (86.9 percent of page views) rather than from search engines (7 percent) or social media (5.7 percent).
• Facebook referrals accounted for two-thirds of that traffic coming from outside sites despite a much more active Twitter feed.
• 78.7 percent of visits lasted 30 seconds or less. That number was 75.8 percent in September 2014.

School starts, audience doubles

It shouldn't come as a shock that students make up the majority of visitors to theorion.com website. How big a part of the audience is evident by this chart provided through the Awstats program available from the paper's web hosting service, BlueHost.

Average daily page views for the month of Augest were 8,976, but the average for the first week of classes 12,090. Big difference!

Compared to the first week of classes last fall, though, The Orion audience was tiny:
F2014 first-week page views: 139,628
F2015 first-week page views: 60,448

It's impossible to know why there was twice as much traffic on the site as the same week a year ago, but my best guess is that last fall's staff hit the ground running and was actually posting news online the week BEFORE school started, including stories about a fire at a frat house, a benefit for a student who had drowned over the summer and a plea in a fatal hit-and-run case involving students.

Here are the top theorion.com stories from last week:
HIV the Second Generation, Part 2 (a column that ran last May) - 3,409 views
Chico State Faculty, Staff Hit the Ground Running (a feature story from March) - 3,388 views

No other stories cracked the Top 25 viewed pages. Lots of people were looking at the website, though,, expecting to find new content. The home page had 52,325 visits. The 12th through 25th most viewed pages were section pages for news, sports, features, etc.

The lesson here is that The Orion audience is ready for campus news long before the first issue of the paper comes out on the first Wednesday of the semester. Keep your fingers crossed that not finding what they want won't keep them from coming back now that the semester is in full swing.

For Transition to Digital-First, It Takes a Calendar

Calendar in The Orion's content-management system, Camayak

Probably the most difficult obstacle to moving student (and other) newsrooms from a focus on print to an emphasis on publishing to the Web and mobile platforms is the fear of missing the newsroom's only hard deadline: when PDFs have to be sent to the printer.

This is less difficult in daily newsrooms, which are used to daily deadlines, but even there I see my hometown paper, the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis, posting most of its stories in the morning, long after the print edition in which they appear has gone to press.

Of course, it's possible to train readers to look for stories at a certain time of day or week, but I think most of the audience wants to know what's happening as or just after it's happened -- while it's still news. Keeping a home page fresh and up to date is the mark of a publication that's figured out how to be digital-first.

How do they do it?

I think the best way is by establishing daily deadlines (hourly deadlines for dailies) that regularly and relentlessly push stories onto the website. The Orion has a great tool for that: the calendar function in Camayak, its content-management system.

Camayak can be set up so every story assignment has a deadline. Editors can easily assign one or more stories to each day of the week, ensuring theorion.com has a totally different home page at least every day. Managing editors can tell at a glance which sections are holding content for print and not producing a steady stream of content to the website. And everyone on staff can see which stories are missing or late: they're tagged in red.

Breaking news, of course, can't be produced on a schedule and shouldn't be. Those stories should be tweeted as they happen and a brief version posted to the web as soon as possible, maybe even from the scene. A longer version of the story offering context and more reporting can be posted later.

But what about that pesky print deadline?

As I told our editor-in-chief, Risa Johnson, last week, the print newspaper will take care of itself if one story from each section is posted to the web every day. Seven stories times six sections (including photo) will provide more than enough copy and art to fill the paper.