Site Stuff: Fortifying our weekly features

Nov 18, 2023 • 2:13 am

1.5K

Our coverage has become faster, more fun and more reader-friendly with the advent of the Feeds, but we're also sticking by certain longstanding staples.

In fact, we're looking to fortify them.

Let's start with Friday Insider, the thing I've playfully called our franchise feature since its inception in 2014.

I've been doing it myself for a while. I've enjoyed it. At times, I've felt it's some of the most compelling content I'm offering. But I've also got a lots of plates I'm spinning on a lot of sticks, even beyond the bylined material that's visible to the public, and Insider occasionally gets punted back a week, to the very clear chagrin of our readership as a whole.

I get that. I appreciate that. If Insider was lousy, no one would miss it, right?

So here's a solution: Beginning Dec. 1, since there wouldn't have been an Insider next week regardless due to Thanksgiving, I'll write either one or two Insiders per month, depending on the number of Fridays that month, and Corey Crisan (Steelers), Taylor Haase (Penguins) and Alex Stumpf (Pirates) will write one each. Mine will be on all three teams. The latter three, of course, will be team-specific.

There are lots of pluses to this, chief among them that no one will feel forced to ram something into an every-seven-days deadline when there might not be any meaningful access in that given week.

We're also moving toward strengthening all of our weekly features. We want all of them -- Mound Visit, War Room, Drive to the Net, Chalk Talk, Insider, Site Stuff and my favorite, Cartoon Canon -- to be all they can be. To be built on a quality above a standard article. To be memorable. To be dependable. And to achieve that, we'll place more emphasis on these than on standard articles, housing the material that usually goes into the latter in the Feeds and in other forms.

Finally here, a reminder that the past four weekly features are always shown at the bottom of the home page, and all weekly features have dedicated pages you can access via our Menu, this under Regular Features.

OPEN LATE FOR LIGHT UP NIGHT!

Hey, it's Light Up Night here in our Downtown, the 62nd year for this one-of-a-kind Pittsburgh celebration in which every window's lit, every shop's open and, for the first time, all of our Three Sisters bridges -- Sixth Street, Seventh Street, Ninth Street over the Allegheny -- will be turned on to flash their new world-class LED lighting.

It'll be an amazing setting. I'm hanging around throughout, then heading up to Cleveland for tomorrow's Steelers-Browns game at around midnight or so. I really hate missing these.

On that note, come and see us!

Dali and I'll be at 224 Fifth Avenue, which she made seasonally festive just yesterday -- see photo above -- until 10 p.m. Or even later, as circumstances dictate. She's got a ton of new Grade-A merch here, much of it geared toward Christmas gifting, and we'll both be happy to take you on a mini-tour of what we've got.

She'll be on hand all day, and I'll be making it there around 4 p.m. at the soonest.

Seriously, stop by! We're right around the corner from Market Square!

INSIDE THE WORKS

• Those little cartoon emojis of our full-time staff are now available only to the full-time staff. When you see one attached to your comment, consider it a sign that we've seen/liked/respected what you had to say. And we'll be adding some, as well.

• The Hot Button feature, which was a feed-like thing before we even had a Feed, will soon have all the perks that the current Feeds do. Including affording Bob Maddamma many more options in how he presents his content to you.

• Can't say this often enough: The Feeds were only the first of a two-step process. The other is comments, and that hasn't even begun. They'll be a massive upgrade over what we have now. Soon enough.

• The ongoing hiring process is taking some turns, and it might not wind up quite the way we'd expected. But that happens. Stuffing square pegs into round holes doesn't work anywhere, and it's more important to find the best people, then build from there. And again, there's no rush.

• It's been more than a month now of being blissfully ad-free for subscribers, albeit with a few lingering hiccups, and that now includes the elimination of the spinning DKPS/advertiser logo upon each refresh. Now, all a refresh means is a refresh of the page.

• If you aren't subscribed yet or if your subscription's expired: this is our new subscribe page. Make sure you're logged in, tap on the link, and thumb down to the bottom for the SUBSCRIBE button to buy/renew at the monthly or annual level. We also have our new pages completed for student subscriptions and senior subscriptions.

BACK TO BUSINESS

• Our page-view numbers for the past week were 958,477, with 38,738 unique users over the most recent full seven-day span. Our most-read original piece was my Friday Insider led with the Chuks Okorafor exclusive, at 20,794. Our top files, right from our Google Analytics page, are at the bottom of this section.

• On the multimedia front, our podcast downloads for the past week were 132,718, and our YouTube video views for the past week were 146,480.

• Our company social media accounts are at 51,531 followers on X, 40,164 on Facebook, 25,935 on YouTube, 14,948 on Instagram ... and already 2,968 on the new Threads!