Town News announced today that its team has launched an add-on feature to their BLOX site search called “MegaSearch.”
Turning on MegaSearch extends the areas of the site search to products, such as BLOX classifieds, BLOX e-Editions, BLOX Marketplace and BLOX Calendars. Users benefit from a more comprehensive search tool, shortening the time it takes to find things on the site.
To read more about Town News BLOX MegaSearch, click the following link: http://tinyurl.com/7knx9k7
Look, someone is BUYING newspapers: Buffett to buy 63 newspapers:
http://www.omaha.com/article/20120517/NEWS01/120519629
The Inland Press Association published a strong article on how newsrooms need to start planning now for their November election coverage. Check it out at the link below:
http://tinyurl.com/6mk6bg5
Alice Echo-News Journal | Residents upset over tax increase
Ashland Daily Press | Baseball highlights
Brownwood Bulletin | Band concert preview
Circleville Herald | Making way for a new school
Cherokee Co. News-Advocate | Highway ribbon cutting
Stephenville Empire-Tribune | Election preview coverage
Grand Rapids Herald-Review | Interesting bike
Hibbing Daily Tribune | Fun with writing
Logan Daily News | Stilt walker
Mesabi Daily News | Solar boats
Sawyer County Record | Spring concert
Star Democrat | 2-minute drill
Vinton County Courier | Tree installation
Waxahachie Daily Light | Cinco de Mayo
Cecil Whig | Softball playoffs
The numbers are in, and video viewership is growing at all ACM websites throughout the country.
In January 2012, ACM, as a company, surpassed the 1 million video view mark after 2-plus years of including video on its digital content offerings. As of May 16, ACM’s video channels have experienced 425,045 more video views, bringing the company’s total to 1,479,146 video views.
That’s huge growth in just 4 months. The growth has be attributed to several more newsrooms embracing ACM’s content strategy of “Digital First… Print Best,” as well as having 20 members of the ACM Digital Reporter Project in the field.
The website with the highest video viewership between the timeframe of Jan. 20-May 16, 2012, is the Brownwood Bulletin, and its website www.brownwoodtx.com. The Bulletin’s video channel has experienced 62,807 video views for a 47% growth. It has posted 157 videos in that same time frame.
Hats off to the Bulletin staff and regional online coordinator Matthew Hinman for their efforts to beef up their video content.
Other video channels with strong growth since Jan. 20, 2012 to date are:
• Athens (Ohio) Messenger: 46,607 video views, 21% growth
• Stephenville (Texas) Empire-Tribune: 39,342 video views, 31% growth
• Cecil Whig (Elkton, Md.): 32,455 video views, 13% growth
• Alice (Texas) Echo-News Journal: 30,892, 36% growth
A couple newsrooms that deserve a special mention are:
• Logan (Ohio) Daily News: Channel has seen 14,449 video views since Jan. 20, 2012 — an increase of 52%. Special thanks to editor Rochelle Hawk, a member of the Digital Reporter Class 2.0.
• Valley Town Crier (McAllen, Texas): Video coverage of a hail storm garnered 22,987 video views.
• The Star Democrat (Easton, Md.) has posted more videos (263) since Jan. 20, 2012, than any other newsroom — leading to an increase in video views of 45% during the same time period.
• Mesabi (Virginia, Minn.) Daily News has seen an increase of 66% in video views. The staff has produced 42 of its 92 videos in the last four months. Kudos to Jesse White, another member of the Digital Reporter Project 2.0 class for his efforts.
Curious to know your newspaper website’s video stats? Check out the graphic below (click to enlarge):
Two ACM websites, the Cecil Whig’s site at www.cecildaily.com, and the Athens Messenger’s www.athensohiotoday.com, use crime and fire maps to provide news in an informative and interactive way on their home pages.
Read the message below provided by Josh Shannon, digital content coordinator for the Cecil Whig:
An example of the crime map featured on the home page of the Cecil Whig’s website at www.cecildaily.com
“We just use the template in Blox called Core Asset Index Map. The best part is that it doesn’t really require much extra work to maintain. We just map all the stories that our reporters are already writing. When we post the stories, we add the address in the location field on Blox. (That also makes a small map appear on the article page, under the photo.) The map just pulls in that data and plots the location. We also set the map up to require a certain keyword so that only crime stories appear (not, say, a story about a new business that we included the location for.)
“Obviously crime news is almost always at the top of our most read stories list, and we look at the map as just another way to present a list of crime news to the readers.
“The downside is that it does take up a lot of real estate on the homepage and can interfere with scrolling down the page (if your cursor is over the map, scrolling zooms out the map rather than moves the page down). Jake (Owens, editor of the Whig) and I have talked about ways to make the map smaller or move it to a dedicated section page for crime, but for now, we’ve left it as is.”
For more information on how to set the map up on your site, please email Rick Rogers at rogers@amconmedia.com.
This week we return to our weekly front page gallery. Check out some of these great pages.
