Most Viewed Pages on theorion.com

Here are the website pages (other than the home page) that attracted the highest number of views in September:
1. The opinion blogs - 4,581 visits
2. Update: Student struck in hit-and-run has died (Ernesto Rivera) - 2,609 visits
3. Student in critical condition after alleged hit-and-run (Ernesto Rivera) - 2,137 visits
4. The news section - 1,348 visits
5. The sports section - 1,090 visits

The home page, according to BlueHost analytics, had 31,170 visits from Sept. 12 to Sept. 30, the period the new website has been tracking visitors.

The external websites that sent the most traffic to theorion.com in the same few weeks were:
• Facebook mobile
• Facebook
• AOL
• Equestria Daily (a My Little Pony fansite)
• The Chico State website

Tips for Getting Engaged

Bryan Murley, who writes the Innovation in College Media blog, posted a piece this morning about Dunbar's number, a way of gauging how well a media outlet is engaging its audience. Here's a quote:

Let's say you have 30 staffers on your newspaper at a campus of 10,000 students. Between them, those staffers likely “know” at most 4,500 people (assuming there is some overlap because they know each other). That leaves at least 5,500 students that they don’t know, and the potential that over half of your campus has no social connection to your media outlet.

The key to increasing relevance, then, is to find a way to get those people into your coverage, so they feel a sense of belonging.

He follows with several great tips about how a college paper can do a better job with engagement.

I think this is must reading for The Orion and other college papers. Take a look and then offer comments below.

More Ideas From My Visit to The Bee

My visit to The Sacramento Bee inspired three more ideas for improving The Orion's online effort:

• While the sports staff is doing a great job of posting stories soon after games or matches have concluded, I'm not seeing sports updates on Twitter. I'm guessing that's because I'm not following any of the sports writers, as most readers aren't. @theorion_sports should be retweeting what the reporters are posting.
• It's been easier for the other sections to plan a week of stories in advance than it has been for news, which is still going days without posting stories to theorion.com. News doesn't happen on a schedule, of course, so that's part of the reason. But I also think the requirement that reporters write one story a week is another. Everyone seems to be writing for page one or, at least, writing a longer story to fulfill the requirement. I'd rather see three 100-word stories that keep the home page fresh than one 12-incher that just takes up space on page 3. Those fresher, shorter stories could be written off scanner traffic, previewing a campus event or even reworking a press release.
• Bee Executive Editor Joyce Terhaar suggested that keeping a visual running tally of page views for individual web stories would inspire reporters to focus on producing for the website and mobile app. Orion Managing Editor Quinn Western could pull up the analytics at the beginning of each day and list the top five or 10 stories on the office white board so everyone can see whose stories are reader favorites.

Inspired by The Bee

My visit to The Sacramento Bee offices on Friday confirmed for me that The Orion is on well on its way to becoming a digital-first news organization. I sat through the morning news meeting, met lots of reporters and editors, and had great talks with Tom Negrete, manager of innovation and news operations, and Joyce Terhaar, the executive editor.

What I saw and heard got me thinking about a couple of things:

• The Bee has a full-time person who manages its social media effort and uses real-time data to keep an eye on what readers are responding to on the Bee's website. He even makes adjustments to the home page based on the traffic he sees. I think a job like that would be a good addition at The Orion.

• When I described to Terhaar The Orion's ideal reporting process of Tweeting about an event or story, writing something brief to post on theorion.com and then writing a longer piece for the print paper, she said that's exactly what they're doing at The Bee.

• Another full-time job at The Bee is a reporter who works primarily with data. Phillip Reese told me The Bee has hundreds of databases reporters at the paper use to develop stories. Both Terhaar and Negrete told me data journalism is one of the skills journalism graduates should be bringing with them into the job world. It'd be great to see The Orion doing more of it.

• The Bee has a photo gallery on its home page called Day in Pictures. Most of the photos I saw capture events in the Sacramento area that wouldn't usually require a print story. It's a great way to get ordinary people in the paper and keep the home page fresh. The Orion could do that, too.

• The morning meeting takes place in a room with a big white board on the wall on which editors have written page-one prospects a couple of weeks out. That sort of planning would be a welcome addition in Plumas 001.

What made my visit extra special were all the great things people had to say about The Orion's latest Bee summer interns. When I told people I advise The Orion, they offered wonderful compliments about Kacey Gardner, Anthony Siino (who is now working as an on-call copy editor there) and Ben Mullin. Joyce Terhaar, the executive editor, made a special point of asking if Chico State has more students like them who could join the paper next summer. That was really good to hear!

Knowing Where Your Audience Lives

Anyone who has walked across the Chico State campus on Wednesday (Orion Day!) has seen, but maybe not noticed, what I see every week:
• Orion staffers at a table in The Gauntlet handing out copies of the newspaper
• Students sitting on benches, tables, retaining walls and other perches with their heads bent over mobile phones
• Stacks of papers in racks waiting to be snatched up by those same students.

There are fewer papers waiting in those stacks on days when there's breaking news (as there was this week), of course, but too many newspapers remain on the racks when the distribution crew makes its rounds the following Wednesday. 

That shouldn't be a surprise. The Orion's primary target audience -- students -- prefers to get its news in digital form. Here are some numbers to think about:
• The Orion prints 5,000 copies every week, but only about 2,000 are distributed on campus.
• Since Sept. 12 (when the new website launched), theorion.com has had 11,885 unique visitors who have made 22,091 visits and viewed 175,000 pages -- an astonishing 7.92 pages per visit.
• The Orion mobile app, which has been slow to pick up new users, has 429 unique users in the past 30 days. They made 1,968 visits in that time.

(Click on the charts below to see the actual statistics)

Even assuming many or most of the app users also use theorion.com and some small percentage of students pick up their papers off campus, it's fair to say The Orion's most important audience, students, are much likelier -- maybe as much as five times likelier -- to get their news online.

Can you think of a better argument for making sure the website is updated at least daily, what everyone agrees is what the online audience wants and expects?

Good First Week for the New Website

In the first full week since theorion.com was relaunched with a new design:
• 3,605 individuals visited the website and made
• 6,671 visits, viewing
• 57,527 pages.

The biggest single day was yesterday (Wednesday), when 1,416 visits were made by visitors who viewed 12,084 pages, according to statistics compiled by The Orion's web hosting service.

I don't have the comparable week from last year, but from Oct. 31-Nov. 6, 2012:
• 5,918 visits were recorded on the old site and
• 11,716 page views.

That week, a Monday was the busiest day (1,330 visits) of a week  that included news stories about Halloween lawlessness near campus and the beginning of Mason Sumnicht's unsuccessful fight to overcome acute alcohol poisoning after a 21st birthday celebration. So, a pretty big news week.

The Orion relaunch week's biggest day was Wednesday (more typical of last year's traffic patterns) when most of the week's newspaper stories were posted to the website. That says to me that
• visitors to the site increase when there's fresh content to see, and
• Orion visitors have been trained to look for news on Wednesdays.

Don't Miss the Video

It's been great to see both the volume and quality of stories being produced by The Orion's video team this semester. Jeff Barron and Erik Walker's short features are often the freshest elements on the home page, and I love the way they're defining what an Orion video looks, feels and sounds like.

I especially appreciate the way each piece has a consistent open and close -- the sections sliding into place beneath The Orion logo and an animated screen shot of how to find more videos and content on the website -- with the occasional twist, usually a funny or interesting closing actuality from someone interviewed for a story.

So far, the two biggest strengths of these stories has been the creative approach of the team and the consistently professional editing.

After looking closely at the last couple of posts, the free-school-supplies story and the Jake Shimabukuro concert story, I think a few simple tweaks would help improve the overall quality of the videos:
• As good as the hand-held shots have been generally, they would have been even better with a tripod. I noticed the concert shots going in and out of focus at the edges of the frame, and I think a tripod might have helped there, too.
• Sound continues to be a problem whenever video is shot remotely. The Samantha Duncan interview, for example, has a consistent echo (probably from all the hard surfaces in that room), while the Eli Goodsell interview had none (probably because of all the things the sound could bounce off of in his office). One good way to make the sound more consistent is to make a habit of using a lavalier mic clipped to a person's shirt, blouse or sweater for interviews.
• Lighting outdoors has been particularly good, but indoors has been a problem. Eli Goodsell, for example, was placed directly underneath an overhead light, so the top of his head reflects a strong white light and his features are in shadow. When deploying a light kit isn't practical, be aware of what's happening with the existing light.
• I'm happy to see fewer zooms and pans, but I'd like to see even fewer...like none.

To see more work by Jeff, Erik, Emily Bertolino, Ethan Snee and Juan Cisneros, navigate to the video page on theorion.com.