Some companies farm out their customer service to foreign countries. This one keeps it in-house.
Quite literally.
Those three people photographed up top, vacationing in Iceland last summer, do all of the direct business communication with our readers. My wife Dali handles all the Help emails, my daughter Dara processes all the military subscription requests, and I recently began sending out personal emails to each and every new subscriber welcoming them to our little world.
This takes time, but we've believed from the beginning that no matter what became of this venture, we'd never get too big to alter that approach. We're a Pittsburgh company, as well as a Pittsburgh family, and we've had countless experiences with readers that reinforce how much that's mattered to you.
I'll confess here, we laugh when an angry reader reaches out and gets mad that "your customer service reps" need to fix a given issue, as if they're emailing outer Bangladesh or something.
We're right here. Always.
VETERANS COUNT: 138
Josh DeNinno at Moon Golf Club wants to remind readers of his Veterans Challenge to our subscribers. Josh is buying 10 a month himself for a total of 100 in 2019, and he's challenging subscribers to achieve a goal of 1,000 by year's end.
Current count: 138
Here’s where to contribute. -- DK
LIFETIMES LEFT: 57
We've sold 43 Lifetime Lunatic subscriptions, so 57 remain toward our new cap of 100, combined with the original 500. There's no plan to sell more in the foreseeable future. It costs $299. If you'd like one, buy it here. If you're an existing subscriber and want to go Lifetime, do the same thing, then email us at Help@DKPittsburghSports.com to let us know. We'll refund the remainder of your existing account. -- DK
FROM THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
We ask ourselves a lot of questions about the site and how we're doing things. We are, after all, something that's pretty much different from anything else out there. So we're always trying to tweak and streamline things. Sometimes they work and we stick with them. Other times, we try something and it doesn't work and we usually realize that pretty quickly.
One question I always ask myself: Do interview videos matter? Some analytics suggest they do. Others say they don't.
Full disclosure, I'm not huge on them. When I'm talking to a guy in a one-on-one situation, which I almost always try to do if possible, I really don't like to put the phone up in his face. But others, including DK, swear by it.
My question would be: Do you, the readers, find those kind of videos helpful or insightful? Do you watch them?
Let me know in comments. -- Dale Lolley
FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR
Statistics have been a part of sports since the beginning of competition and the backs of baseball cards were rich with data that could be absorbed and recited by young fans. Old fans, too. But statistics eventually led to analysis, or at least the pursuit of analysis – sure Babe Ruth hit 60 homers, but were they mostly on fastballs or curves?
In the past two decades, the catalog of stats has grown at a staggering pace. Where once we were satisfied with W-L records, home run and RBI totals, now we learn about players through oddly named new metrics, WAR and OBP and BABIP. And my favorite, PECOTA, which is a forecasting algorithm that was developed by Nate Silver. It was named for Bill Pecota, a truly average major-leaguer who amassed a .249 batting average in nine years with the Royals, Mets and Braves.
Stats and data analysis are a big part of our coverage at DKPS, and it's about to get much better. Dejan announced in Thursday's What's Brewing that beginning next week Jason Rollison's Mound Visit and Chris Carter's Carter's Classroom would become daily features. In my first month on the staff, I have come to appreciate these features as much as anything we do. Smart, modern and always instructive. I learn something about sports I've been following for decades each time I read their work. I hope everyone enjoys these daily doses of knowledge as much as I know I will. -- Jim Barger
FROM THE DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
We're always looking to grow our base of business partners, and there currently are several very good opportunities available to take advantage of our unprecedented reach. Our 2019 media kit has all the info you’d want. Email me directly at Dali@DKPittsburghSports.com to set up a meeting. -- Dali Kovacevic
WE'RE LISTENING
• If you enjoy the Hot Button feature and would like to receive app alerts when there's a new entry, open your app, then the menu on the top right corner, then ALERTS. Toggle the new Hot Button icon to ON. We had that added in the past week. -- DK
• Our developers at Build In Motion are adding Face ID and Touch ID logins for Apple users. Android will have to wait because it's much more complicated. -- DK
• We've also formed a plan to address the disappearing-keyboard issue that's affecting a few users -- on Android, of course -- but that'll take a good bit longer. -- DK
BACK TO BUSINESS
• New subscribers for 2019 are at 421. You can now track this figure daily at the bottom of the desktop and tablet versions of the site.
• Our daily active app users, averaged out over the past week, are at 11,925, broken down as 9,412 on Apple, 2,513 on Android. That total's minus-287 from the previous week. This figure will always fluctuate with the seasons and the news, so the goal is a steady, gradual increase, initially to 15,000, a number we've never achieved.
• Our daily page views, averaged out over the past month, are at 62,328. The goal with this figure is also about a steady, gradual increase, first to 100,000, a number we've achieved only during the two Stanley Cup runs.
• Our most-hit original article of the past week -- exempting live files -- was last week's Friday Insider led by Phil Kessel trade updates at 9,012. The Pirates accounted for 134,209 page views, the Steelers 87,894, and the Penguins 39,022.
• We're at 32,082 (+16) followers on Twitter, we're at 31,934 (+168) page likes on Facebook, we're at 10,797 (+24) followers on Instagram. These figures are just for our official company account on each platform, not for us as individuals.
• If you've got a blog or forum or social media account with some significant background and credibility, email me directly at DK@DKPittsburghSports.com to see how we can partner up.
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