When I have time, I enjoy going into the statistics section of our website to see what’s getting the attention of readers.
I don’t get to do this very often, but last week I was paying attention for several reasons. We had a lot of stories that were on the website long before they came out in the newspaper. So I wanted to see how they were doing.
Very generally, stories about local crime tend to get the most readers. Unexpected events like house fires and car wrecks also do pretty well.
In my “where do we go from here?” moments, I think we could make the website a really sensational, scandalous, must-visit address. But that would cost us a lot of the credibility we’ve built up over the decades.
Anyway, last week had an interesting mix of stories that got the most “reads,” as our system calls them.
Before diving into those numbers, it will help to compare them to the press run of the newspaper.
Right now we print about 2,950 copies of each edition. We’re down about 170 subscribers since we cut back to two issues per week in June.
We are way down from the days when we sold 10,000 or 12,000 papers. The website is making up some of that difference, but not all.
One thing about a website is that it keeps count of each story’s reads. You can see what interests your readers.
For the seven days of Friday, Oct. 10 to Thursday, Oct. 16, two county government stories got the most attention — which is a rarity.
A Pike County supervisor’s idea for sanctioned drag racing, to which the sheriff rightly objected, was the top story with 3,383 reads. No. 2, with 3,048, was the story in which Supervisor Justin Lofton and Tax Assessor Laurie Allen snapped at each other about the upcoming residential property tax increase.
The No. 3 story was a small one about a February 2026 trial date set for local attorney Robert Lenoir. It got 2,787 reads, which I can report is a lot lower than most stories about his case.
No. 4 was a good one, about a DoorDash driver who was making deliveries in a city of McComb vehicle and got busted when he brought some food to a McComb fire station. You can see the humor in the situation, which got 2,500 reads. I’m sorry the driver lost his job, but geez.
The next four stories all got between 1,400 and 1,800 reads: A photo of the North Pike homecoming court (another surprise), Magnolia’s pep talk for cancer patient Janice Felder, two accident deaths the prior weekend and my Oct. 11 column on a local shooting death.
What’s missing from this list? Local sports and obituaries, for starters. I have always considered both as anchors of any newspaper’s coverage, but they are not highly ranked on our website
The stories from the Oct. 10 football games each got around 1,000 reads. Most stories previewing last weekend’s games got less than that.
As for obituaries, funeral homes have their own websites and a lot of viewers go to those locations. Our daily obituaries rarely get more than a few hundred reads, perhaps because they are behind the paywall.
For kicks, I checked all stories from Oct. 1 to Oct. 16. A White Acres shooting got 13,200 reads. Amite County homicide arrests got 6,200.
A South Pike school board meeting about the annual state grades got 9,000 reads, which seems inflated. A resignation from the McComb school board got 4,900 and reconstruction at the Summit roundabouts got 4,500.
What’s it all mean? Like many other businesses, we are navigating through a sea of great change. This presents both challenges and opportunities. Bottom line, I know people are still interested in local news, and we’ll keep giving it to them.
