Food for Thought: A News Cafe has just completed its third quarter. (You can catch up with the previous reports if you missed the first and second ones.)
FFT’s growth reminds me of what it must feel like for an astronaut to experience the G-force as the rocket lifts off and picks up speed.
Nine months ago Doni sat down to pen her first blog after being unceremoniously canned from the newspaper.
Fast-forward nine months. This modest blog, now affectionately know as Food for Thought: A News Café, is an important community resource for news, commentary, entertainment and humor. It provides a forum for 44 writers and 16 bloggers to share their talents and insights. The number of contributors is growing daily.
Food for Thought has become a cherished online gathering place for those who live in – or are interested in – the north state.
Those of you who are regular readers know that August was an important month for Food for Thought. Doni partnered with friend Kelly Brewer to create Food for Thought: A News Cafe.
They were joined online by such high-profile newspaper talent as Jim Dyar, arts and entertainment editor and writer; Phil Fountain, artist and cartoonist; and Thom Gabrukiewicz, outdoors editor and writer. Other former newspaper professionals also became part of the FFT family: Linda Woodcook, advertising sales representative; Shannon Calder, book reviewer, and Lauren Brooks, former cops reporter/now Chico ER arts editor.
As important as these wonderful additions were to the expansion and growth of Food for Thought: A News Cafe, that’s only part of the story. As Kelly says, “Food for Thought is greater than the sum of its parts.”
What we are seeing here is nothing less than the future of how members of a community will connect in a larger forum. It’s a loosely moderated place to exchange ideas and news about our community. It’s a place to come for stories, photos, press releases, death notices and government meeting agendas. It’s a place to check road conditions, weather, national, international and business news. It has a forum for readers to bring up topics that they believe are important. It has an interactive community calendar to keep us up on what’s going on around town. It has local advertisers because business people understand that Food for Thought attracts the kind of community that they want to be associated with. In short, Food for Thought, in nine months, has become the destination of choice for those who want an open, honest, civil representation of this complex place we call home.
The last three months have shown a fundamental change in the look and feel of Food for Thought: A News Cafe. It is a much deeper, richer website with more voices, more categories and more use of technology. We will continue to expand. Our goal is to continue to bring you more local talent. Some will be professional journalists, some will be talent from other fields, and some will not have a background in writing but will have compelling stories to share.
This quarter’s statistics show some impressive increases in readership, manifested in the numbers presented in the graphs above.
“Unique Visitors” are the number of computers that have logged on to view the site. That number increased from 10,635 to 12,871, an increase within this quarter of 21 percent.
“Number of visitors” is the total number of times donigreenberg.com was logged onto for each month. That number expanded from 28,585 to 43,273; an increase within this quarter of 51 percent.
Then there are “Page Views” – that represents the number of web pages that were viewed in a given month. In August, that number grew from 225,169 to 657,651, a mind-boggling 192 percent increase within this latest quarter.
Of the 12,871 unique visitors who came to Food for Thought: A News Cafe in August, more than 81 percent came directly to our site. They weren’t baited to come here with key words. They didn’t stumble upon us using a search engine. They either typed in donigreenberg.com or they came here because they had Food for Thought: A News Cafe saved as a favorite. This was further verified by the fact that, on average, readers viewed more than 15 pages per visit.
So there you go. Food for Thought: A News Cafe’ is growing at a very healthy clip. It’s a locally made “wesite” that’s a tribute to everyone who comes here.
Our third-quarter numbers bear testimony to this site’s popularity and untapped potential.
Thank you for helping Food for Thought reach this exciting stage of its development. We hope you’ll continue being part of this ride as we reach even greater heights.
