See, I can tell you that Petco Park's one of the prettiest in all of Major League Baseball, in part because of its majestic floral arrangements all over the place.
Or, as with the pic I snapped above, I can show you.
One of the oldest writing adages suggests that the show option is always better than the tell, and I've forever been a passionate believer. If I've ever got the choice between telling you the Pirates are running the bases more aggressively or showing it to you with a singular vivid, detailed example, as I did in the Tuesday column from San Diego, there's never a hesitation.
In that same spirit, we're aiming collectively to offer even more visuals. To make you feel like you're there with us, whether it's right here in Pittsburgh or anywhere that we travel.
That means giving you the feel of being inside or outside the stadium:
DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPS
Entry to second deck, Petco Park, San Diego.
DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPS
The side of the Western Metal Supply Co. building no one sees, from Tony Gwynn Way.
It goes beyond sports, too. If I stray a bit in California, as I did this week, I want to share that with you, as well:
DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPS
The famed Unconditional Surrender statue in Tuna Harbor Park, San Diego.
DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPS
Apple advertising murals opposite Staples Center, Los Angeles.
You'll find more examples of that here on our app/site, as I hope I illustrated from San Diego and Los Angeles this past week, and some of it will also be disseminated on social media. That way, people who aren't yet subscribed can get a sense for how committed we are to covering all three of our teams everywhere they go. Every game. Every practice. Every camp session. Every league meeting. And we're as proud of that as we are of the readership that makes it possible.
Number of Pittsburgh outlets that travel with the teams: Just us and the Post-Gazette. That's it.
If you'd like to follow our trails on social media, the best ways will be on our dramatically upgraded YouTube channel, as well as our Instagram page. Both are, of course, free.
PODCASTS SMASH RECORD
Tired of hearing about how we top all our previous podcast marks every other week?
Well, rest assured we aren't.
The past seven-day period saw a phenomenal 135,363 downloads across all our platforms, which blew away our previous peak by a 26% margin! And we're now up to 41,454 unique listeners over the past 30 days!
Sure, the NFL Draft helped. It always does. But I've always felt like the bumps should be embraced, not dismissed as exceptions. How a business handles the bumps is a plus, not a minus, in reflecting on performance. And the extraordinary work of Dale Lolley, Chris Carter and Tom Reed on that front deserves the credit for it.
ON TOM'S PIECE
Speaking of travel, one pledge I made to Tom when he came aboard is that he'd always be able to go wherever needed to get the story he wanted. So when he asked me after the Steelers' draft about flying to California to dive deep into Najee Harris' backstory, the conversation we had was very short. He was booked by nightfall and on the plane the next day.
And man, did he ever deliver.
That, to me, was one of the high-water journalistic marks this business has known, right up there with Dale's mega-exclusive interview with Troy Polamalu.
But again, so did you. Without your support, do you think we're just randomly whipping out a couple grand to pull that off? Know how many annual subscriptions that takes?
GEARING UP FOR CUP
It appears the Stanley Cup playoffs will begin next week. Which is wonderful. For you, for this business and, hey, maybe for the local franchise.
Our goal is to cover them as intensely as we're allowed. Dave Molinari, Taylor Haase and I will be on top of everything every step of the way. Which, by the way, is why I flew out to San Diego to do baseball this week. No telling how tough it'll be for me to be around the Pirates for a while.
WEEKLY APP TIPS
Sharing ways to make your app experience even better:
• I made a small change this week on the horizontal blue stripe across the middle of the home page: There's now a tab for my columns. So the four options now are HOME, TODAY, COLUMNS and PODCASTS. The Today one, for anyone who doesn't know, is a daily schedule of our teams' events, on top of What's Brewing and our staff locator map.
Our previous two tips:
• Activate your alerts! With our old site, we had 19,000-plus people receiving alerts. With this one, it's still fewer than 1,000. And that's because we're waiting on you to make that happen. To do so, enter your profile/account area by tapping the little circle at the top left of your app. Thumb down a bit to find Notifications, then hit Select. That's where you'll find all your choices.
• We've got space for only the three big team buttons at the bottom of the app -- Steelers, Penguins, Pirates -- but we've also got team pages for our Pitt, Penn State, Duquesne and Robert Morris coverage. Just tap the hamburger menu at the top right, find your school and tap to see a full, beautiful display of all our latest pieces by Chris Carter, Jarrod Prugar and others. On the desktop/laptop, all the team/college buttons are across the top.
BACK TO BUSINESS
• Our page views for the past week were 689,606, up 11.1% from the previous week. Our most-read original piece was my column on the Steelers drafting Harris, at 10,534. Broken down by team, articles on the Steelers brought 29.7% of our traffic, the Penguins 20.4%, the Pirates 9.8%.
• Our new subscribers for the past week were at 50, up three from the previous week. We actually had a zero day in there Thursday, and man, those are (fortunately) rare.
• Our new app downloads for the past week were 165 for Apple, up 65 from the previous week, and 11 for Android, down 37 from the previous week.
• Our podcast downloads for the past week were a record 135,363, up 26% from the previous week.
• We're at 40,767 (+143) followers on Twitter, we're at 37,108 (+26) followers on Facebook, we're at 14,499 (+31) followers on Instagram, and we're at 1,773 (+529) followers on YouTube. These figures are just for our official company account on each platform, not for us as individuals.
• We make mistakes. If you see one, email: Typos@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Anything you need, including lost/forgotten passwords, email: Help@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Random geographic fun: We had ... uh, 18 unique users in mainland China? Yeah, that's it. And hey, not that I'm skeptical, but we had more in Taiwan, more in Thailand, more in the Philippines ... and none of those places exactly approximates a population of a billion. Hmmmmm ...
