Less surprising to media watchers, as well as the rest of humanity, the Times reported last month that columns devoted to chronicling sexual adventures on campus are popular features at a growing number of college papers.
The Daily Tar Heel is apparently on the opposite side of both trends.
The paper strengthened its emphasis on dailytarheel.com this year, posting Web-only content each day and running a page-one promotional box under the banner that references the online edition. Last spring, those boxes were buried on page two and ran only when the paper had content to highlight. Managing Editor Alex Kaplun says the newfound focus was designed to enhance the profile of the DTH site. "We knew we'd be running a lot of content," says Kaplun, "and we wanted people to go online."
Online Editor Adam Shupe credits these initiatives with increasing the average weekday hits on dailytarheel.com in September to about 70,000, up from a 41,000 daily average for September 2001. Average hits each weekend day have doubled to 20,000. "The online photo galleries and stories promoted on the front page are a great draw for paper-only readers," says Shupe. The DTH prints 20,000 copies of each paper and claims 39,000 daily print readers.
Total hits counts all visits, including each login to a newsroom computer, the home pages of which are set to the DTH site. Shupe says the site registered more than 78,600 "unique hits," or visits from different computers, during the month of October.
Janet Gallagher-Cassel, DTH director and general manager, says these numbers translate into 13,000 dailytarheel.com viewers each day. The Times stated that UCLA's Daily Bruin, serving a campus with at least 10,000 more students in the nation's second largest city, draws only 9,000 daily visitors to its site. And only 30 percent of students polled in a Student Monitor survey from spring 2002 said their campus paper bothered to produce an online version.
According to the Times, Oregon State's Daily Barometer did not update its Web site all summer. The Barometer's summer editor pointed out the obvious utility of the paper version during students' favorite reading time. "It's easier to sit and read it," she said, "than take your laptop to class."
Gallagher-Cassel says print promotion of dailytarheel.com is beneficial but the core online audience remains off campus: alumni and others interested in UNC events. Only 19 percent of the site's visitors, she says, come from "edu" hosts. (Note to conspiracy theorists: One percent of traffic comes from military servers).
The Neilsen//NetRatings service tracks Web traffic at commercial newspapers and reports that during the last week in September, The Wall Street Journal's site received more than 475,000 unique hits and the Los Angeles Times' site more than 600,000. UNC journalism Professor Phil Meyer says commercial paper Web operations are less about expanding readership than preventing the flow of classified advertising revenue to online job sites.
