Colleagues:

I told the latimes.com team that each time we break a record, we will have a Champagne toast. I can only logically deduce that drinking Champagne at work is a recipe for success. We hit an all-time record of 105.5 million page views in April, up 31% over last year.

We always talk about page views in this note, which is one of the best ways to measure how our journalism is resonating with readers, and how to tell if changes we are making to the site are effective. Here are some other figures that the latimes.com business intelligence team passed on:

Our time spent number is growing each month – the time readers spend on latimes.com is up 48% from this time last year.

We had more than 15 million unique users in April – that number has been growing each month this year and is up 58% from last year.

Our local reach is growing too – we have 37% more local visitors coming to the site than this time last year.

Our daily average page views are over 3.5 million – another all-time high. We are seeing strong and broad growth each day, in part because we are doing better than ever at optimizing our stories and other parts of our site to be more findable in search engines like Google, attracting more and more readers.

There are many accomplishments worth toasting over the past month. The Guide officially replaced CalendarLive and is already getting great traffic, and the print and online teams did an outstanding job of covering the Coachella festival. “Birds of Paradise” – the ultimate in user-generated content projects – received a quarter of a million page views, 500 comments, some great submissions and wonderful live reading at the Festival of Books. Light design changes were made to the article pages to better display related content and increase serendipity. Two new blogs were added to the roster – L.A. Unleashed, an animal and pet blog from the metro desk, and Booster Shots, a health blog from Tami Dennis and team. I’m not sure what else there is to say about the Publisher’s Award-winning dynamic duo of Andy Malcolm and Don Frederick – the Top of the Ticket blog broke another all-time traffic record for a blog, almost hitting 2 million page views for the month. Unstoppable.

We’re just getting warmed up – we have a very exciting May ahead of us.

Hollywood Backlot is the name of a photo project launching this month – readers will find a rich database of unique, behind-the-scenes photos from film and TV productions from photographer David Strick. There’s a deep archive of black and white photos, and we’ll be adding new images each week. The design is stunning. Keep an eye out for movie trailers in local theaters in June.

Also in entertainment, we will showcase some of our stars with the launch of weekly critics’ video with Kenneth Turan and Carina Chocano on film, Mary McNamara on television, and the launch of a “Big Picture” film blog from Patrick Goldstein. And there will be daily television chats with readers about popular shows.

A new video project called “I C U” launches in May, telling the stories of people who want to meet and reconnect. Great project from video journalist Katy Newton. There’s more action in the video arena weekly critics’ video – we have a new video studio on the 5th floor to ramp up our ability to do quick turnaround, in-house video. And we have nearly finished the first round of video training for selected reporters and editors.

We’re rolling out more A-Z pages in business, sports, health, and world. This is more glamorous than it sounds. Remember that each of these A-Z pages make it easy for us to provide the latest news from LAT and around the Web, to finally unleash our deep archives, to showcase photos and multimedia around a specific topic such as Kobe Bryant, the World Health Organization, Bill Gates, etc., … growing our A-Z collection creates authoritative pages that dive deep into any number of specific topics.

And some of our brightest data-minded journalists and tech folks are kicking off local database projects, starting with projects around real estate, education, crime, and local government.

If you think we have a lot more work to do in terms of making the site more of an incredibly reader-friendly, head-turning, must-use resource, you are not alone. We are kicking off a rethinking of the homepage, the site and its structure this month.

And now, the lists…


TOP ARTICLES FOR APRIL:

1. Protesters target CNN after Jack Cafferty’s remark (David Pierson)
2. Ominous signs for American Idol (Channel Island) (Scott Collins)
3. Miley Cyrus: Is the Disney starlet disappointing her fans? (Deborah Netburn)
4. Campaign trail gets bumpy for Chelsea Clinton (Robin Abcarian)
5. Why Gov. Bill Richardson didn’t endorse Clinton (Mark Z. Barabak)
6. John McCain gets tax-free disability pension (Ralph Vartabedian)
7. Hillary Clinton loses traction over Barack Obama in Pennsylvania, Indiana (Janet Hook)
8. Bed discovered in sect temple (Miguel Bustillo)
9. Ojai has a love-hate relationship with ‘Pastie Lady’ (Catherine Saillant)
10. Barack Obama may lose support in Philadelphia over ‘street money’ (Peter Nicholas)

TOP BLOGS:

1. Top of the Ticket - 1,922,846 page views
2. Show Tracker - 1,654,931
3. Lakers Blog - 725,720
4. L.A. Land - 601,826
5. La Plaza - 597,365
6. L.A. Now - 494,803
7. Envelope: Dish Rag - 444,578
8. Homicide Report - 426,270
9. Web Scout - 305,806
10. L.A. Unleashed - 215,556 (edging out Travel for the #10 spot in its very first month)

* Our blogs are booming – combined, they received 9.3 million page views in April.


TOP PHOTO GALLERIES:

1. Coachella Music Festival
2. Miley Cyrus: Life in pictures
3. Celebrity shots
4. Stars and plastic surgery
5. Annie Leibovitz's iconic magazine covers
6. Foreclosed listings from Hollywood to Glendale
7. 24 Years of Hot Property: The Ruth Ryon era
8. Miley Cyrus photo scandal
9. Solana Beach shark attack
10. Hollywood's nude photo scandals

TOP VIDEOS:

1. Raw video: Teens charged in brutal attack on cheerleader - 21,760 streams (KTLA)
2. 270 acres burn in Sierra Madre - 10,857 streams (AP)
3. GOP attack ads - 2416407 - 9,910 streams (CNN)
4. Phil Jackson discusses Tuesday's - 9,056 streams (The Kamenetzkys, Lakers Bloggers)
5. Gasol comments on Game 2 win - 8,698 streams (The Kamenetzkys)
6. Rev. Wright calls criticism - 7,963 streams (CNN)
7. Ducklings rescued from storm drain - 7,788 streams (KTLA)
8. Clinton speaks in Philadelphia - 7,635 streams (AP)
9. Bed found in polygamist temple - 7,502 streams (AP)
10. Girls arrested in brutal beating - 7,272 streams (KTLA)

Congratulations, everyone. We are breaking records through smart, creative thinking that is widespread throughout the LA Times.

Meredith Artley
Executive Editor, LATimes.com


Links for the Mac folks:

http://theguide.latimes.com/
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-novel,0,1741827.special
http://www.latimes.com/theguide/music/coachella/
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/unleashed/
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times

posted by Ed Padgett | ¶ 11:10 AM