Web traffic in the doldrums

The Orion website had 8,706 page views
last week. The column show views per story

Traffic at theorion.com has settled into a trough the past few weeks after some encouraging spikes last month. A look at the most popular stories from last week gives a clue about the cause.

Hard news, and especially breaking news, has always been the biggest driver of readers to The Orion website. These numbers appear to show less interest in news content, but I think a more accurate reading is that the paper is not reporting newsworthy stories.

The other apparent trend in these analytics is that the opinion section has become more popular. A look at the historical trends, though, shows opinion traffic is about the same as it's always been except for the big jump last month when the column about abolishing Greek life captured lots of views.

I thought a look at web traffic since last year would be interesting, too, so I captured this snapshot of theorion.com page views since last December, the best data available through Google Analytics. It shows overall better daily traffic last spring, the predictable dip in the summertime (which shows students are the sites core readership) and a few spikes this fall. Overall, though, readership is down. This would be a good topic for this week's ed board and section meetings.

Some ideas for designing square-tab pages from AARP

When newspaper publishers decided to save money by reducing page widths on broadsheet pages and page heights on tabloid pages, they created some awful canvases for page designers. When The Orion switched to a square tab last year, it took some time for the paper's design staff to recognize they needed to treat the full page the way they had treated each individual story when they were designing a broadsheet. In most cases, though, they were still seeing a single page rather than a spread, at least from a design standpoint.

So, I've been looking around for examples of successful designs in this 11-inch by 11-inch square. I like what the AARP Bulletin has been doing with its paper because Design Director Todd Albertson and his team have figured out how to minimize the shortcoming of the square.

Some examples from this month's issue:

This single page is pretty typical for the Bulletin. Notice the page label at the top separated by lots of white space from a simple bold, all-caps headline and a dek. A sidebar gets extra graphic treatment 

Longer pieces get a facing-pages treatment with a large headline in the top left corner of the left page and an explanatory dek. Notice the use of subheds to break up type and an infographic that ads editorial color on the right page. No jump lines necessary with this layout, by the way.

Standing features in magazines are called departments. The Bulletin identifies them for readers with a heavy blue horizontal line. Notice how the art elements are used on this page and the pages above. Again on this page, the headline is position in the top left corner with plenty of air surrounding it and not stretched across the top of the page, which is the default for The Orion page design. I think this approach helps the page look less cramped and squat. 

Another two-page spread, this one with art at the bottom of the first page and at the top of the second page. Notice, too, the use of the sidebar on the right page. There's a lot of text here, but it doesn't seem overwhelming because of the placement of the art and the dominance of the left-page photo. Notice, too, that all these stories have headlines and deks -- headlines to draw the reader into the story, deks to provide additional information about the story to help readers decide if they want to read further.

Greek column, letter boost September traffic

Orion statistics from quillengage.com

The number of visits to theorion.com crept back to more typical monthly levels in September with a big boost from Whitney Urmann's column advocating the abolition of the Greek system and a letter to the editor written in response to it.

The column generated 40 onsite comments,  6,725 page views (almost 13 percent of total website views for the month) and a letter from a sorority member that had 726 (now 744) page views.

The other top stories for traffic were:
2. Two Chico State students arrested by police, video goes viral - 1,587 page views
3. Chico State students warned of possible gunman - 1.356
4. The Greek letter to the editor - 726
5. Viral arrest video students will face trial - 635

Most visitors to the website in September arrived via smartphone. Quillengage wrote:

Sessions from mobile, desktop, and tablet users were all up this month. In keeping with the month prior, mobile continued to produce more traffic than any other device. With a 78% increase in your site's mobile sessions, mobile traffic reached 15,663 sessions. Your site had 11,140 sessions (up 57% from last month) from desktop users. Tablet traffic was up 52% with 1,221 sessions this month.

Those smartphone numbers are in addition to visitors who viewed The Orion via the paper's mobile app. Here's the report for September from Goodbarber, which provides the hosting (click the graphic for a larger view):

Story-posting fail likely cause of traffic slump

From quillengage

Visits to theorion.com were down last week, but why is not a mystery.

A quick look at the dates on website posts shows no opinion pieces were posted for five days starting Sept. 3, no news stories were posted for three days starting Sept. 9 and Arts & Entertainment had two two-day periods in the past week during which no stories were uploaded.

That's a perfect recipe for declining traffic.

Here are more charts on last week's analytics:

This chart shows Orion app traffic for the past 30 days. Good news: App downloads have now topped the 1,500 mark.

OZY has a great idea

I followed a link the other day to a story on Ozy.com, a online magazine that combines aggregated stories and staff reports, and noticed something I thought was very cool: a "Why You Should Care" box at the top.

It serves a dual purpose:
• It works like a dek, to provide information to time-conscious readers about what the story is going to provide, and
• It supplies context for the story you might find in a third or fourth paragraph of a typical print story. I love that it puts that context in personal terms, the "you" version of "so what?"

I also love that it is designed to be read on a phone, where a majority of people now say they get their online news.

Something to think about.

Police misconduct story pushes web traffic

With web content and, consequently, web traffic barely breathing over the summer, it's always a challenge to re-engage theorion.com audience in August when students return to Chico. This fall, the first-week numbers barely crept above June and July weekly figures.

All it takes is one big story, though, to revive traffic. 

Lucas Moran's interview with two women who posted a video of their encounter with Chico police that went viral attracted more than 4,500 visits to the website in the middle of this week, accounting for 15 percent of all the traffic to the site in August. That was more than the number of visitors to The Orion home page, so people clicking through from Facebook and Twitter accounted for lots of the visits.

The other top stories, by traffic, for August were:

2. The Millennial Effect (Arts & Entertainment) 1,029 views

3. Train Kills Chico Pedestrian (News) 1,000 views
4. Pokeman Go: Tracking the tracker (Arts& Entertainment) 742

5. The Dungeon drug bust (News) 480

Viewing the website on mobile devices was also important in August. Here's what the analysis from Quill Engage, which analyzes Google analytics, said about it:

Traffic By Device

This month, mobile, desktop, and tablet sessions increased. The most traffic came from mobile users, a change of pace from the month before when desktop users accounted for the majority of traffic. With a 270% increase in your site's mobile sessions, mobile traffic reached 8,777 sessions and represented 53% of your site's traffic. Your site had 7,107 sessions (up from 2,793) from desktop users, making up 43% of overall sessions. This was a drop from the previous month when 51% of overall traffic came from desktop. Up from 340, 804 sessions came from tablet users this month. This accounted for just 5% of overall traffic, a drop from 6% last month.

The statistics from GoodBarber, the company that hosts The Orion mobile app, shows the back-to-school effect pretty dramatically:

Here's the Quill Engage summary for the month:

How I would shoot the picture of the day

I started encouraging The Orion editors-in-chief to start assigning a photo of the day a couple of semesters ago. Getting photographers to capture an image every day and post it on theorion.com home page, I explained, was a good idea for a bunch of reasons:
• It would push the website to provide more coverage of campus events because a photo and cutline could tell a story an editor might not consider newsy enough for a word story.
• It would provide as many as a half-dozen images the print editors could play on the briefs page each week to add both news and visual interest.
• It would encourage photographers (and reporters) to be on the lookout for interesting scenes, events and people that readers would like to know about.
• It would provide visuals that would make the website's home page noticeably different every day.

I probably got the idea from my own experience at the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette, where the editors used to run a full page a photos from staff photographers or the wires on the back of the A section every day, and at the Spencer (Iowa) Daily Reporter, where I had no AP photo service and needed to scramble every Sunday afternoon to find a dominant image for my Monday morning front page on the slowest of news days.

I came away with an understanding that readers really like pictures and the pictures didn't need to be buildings burning or rivers flooding to capture their attention.

The Orion's photos of the day could use a little help. I think photographers who are given the assignment to come back with an image for the website don't quite know what the editors (or the adviser) are looking for. Here's a collection from the past week:

I see almost no action and no interesting angles or use of light. I do see the backs of people's heads and two people simply walking. Most of the photos could have been taken on any day and show action that would have been available any time. On the positive side, the photos do show students and the photographer reported their names in the cutlines.

Here's how I would approach the assignment to make stronger, more interesting and more journalistic photos.

1. I'd find campus and community calendars of events and use my artistic and journalistic sense to pick an event that would yield interesting images.
2. I'd give myself 30 minutes to an hour to wander around and talk to people there, looking for an interesting story to tell that I could convey with a single image or a slide show.
3. I'd make sure I was capturing people's faces, but I wouldn't pose my subjects. I'd look for images that showed them doing something and for facial expressions that showed how they felt doing it.
4. I'd shoot from lots of angles to get a variety of shots. I'd look for patterns, repetition, the interplay of light and shadow, and other elements of photo composition.
5. I'd make sure I always had a camera with me, and I'd be constantly on the lookout for visual stories that would interest my readers, those with high news value and those that were just fun and interesting to look at.
6. I'd ask students if they knew about professors, administrators, support staff members, other students and anyone else on campus who did interesting things at work or away from school. Then I'd follow up to see if those people would be willing to let me photograph them doing it.

Maybe the coolest thing about a photo-of-the-day assignment is that, done well and done consistently, it can provide a historical archive of life in Chico and at Chico State that will engage readers now and  for years to come.