The Superior Chronicle to Begin Second Year

IRONWOOD, MI - Monday, December 29, 2008 - The Superior Chronicle will be one year old on Thursday, January 1, 2009. In the twelve short months our website has been online, we have attracted nearly 13,000 unique visitors. Our site has had over 122,000 hits to our home page and, according to our web host, our total hits for the year have totaled 2,018,805. All of this was achieved without any advertising. Our website has been steadily growing solely by word-of-mouth.

Generally Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays get the most hits and the bulk of the hits begin at 7:00 AM and continue through 4:00 PM.

Unlike printed media and localized radio, the Superior Chronicle is available worldwide. Naturally the bulk of our hits are from the United States, but other countries regularly view our site. The order of popularity based on hits is: U.S.; Italy; Germany; Ireland; Canada; Spain; Romania; South Korea; Japan; Australia; Finland; Great Britain; the Netherlands; the Czech Republic; China; Portugal; Thailand; Belgium; Taiwan; Switzerland; Iceland; Poland; the Russian Federation; Hong Kong; Hungary and Bulgaria.

The majority of visits to the site have a duration of between 30 seconds to 15 minutes.

Naturally our home page (index) receives the most hits, however, the following secondary pages are also showing strong numbers: our Archives; Letters to the Editor; our Classified Ads; and Eva Smith-Furgason’s "Not Buying It" series are our top five pages.

73% of our readers have our site bookmarked. 13% find our site through Google. The remainder of our readers find the site either through direct input; via other web links; or through other search engines.

86% of our readers browse our site using Microsoft Internet Explorer. 11.6% use Foxfire.

97.4% of our readers have a Windows Operating System. 1.8% use Macintosh. .3% use Linux.

Our top ten most read stories in the past year are:

KQDS TV21, Duluth; WLUC TV6, Marquette; and WDIO TV10, Duluth have all featured Superior Chronicle photos and they have all borrowed content from the Chronicle.

Have we changed the world? Not by a long shot! Have we impacted our community? In some ways we may have. Our presence alone has made the Ironwood Daily Globe a better paper. The Globe rarely, if ever, covered any City meetings other than the City Commission. Because we are covering more and more meetings, the Globe is following suit. Their early attempts to get this Internet venture shut down are evidence that they view us as a threat. At the most recent DIDA meeting, Joe Karius, publisher of the Globe, while voicing his support of the Hovey Towering Pines, explained why we, as a community shouldn't resist changes and competition. He said, "No! We don't want it! It's not fair! A lot of things are not fair because things change over the years! Things change over the years! My building pays a lot of taxes and everything else happens that you can't help what is gone on when you find your current circumstances and what looks to be the future circumstances are going to be very difficult everywhere. And especially in a community like ours. So when we do have a chance for some development we should take a little broader view..."

Competition is not necessarily a bad thing. More often than not, the public benefits from competition.

Although we are still in our infancy, we do offer somewhat of an alternative to area news. One of our goals for the coming year is to expand our coverage. We will be making attempts to hire reporters and photographers so that we can adequately report on Hurley, Wakefield and Bessemer news as well as establishing a sports reporting network. We are in the final stages of creating our online radio station. At a click of a button you will be able to listen to music, news, weather and sports updates, and hopefully interactive talk radio that will discuss issues of local interest.

It is no secret that our economy is less than perfect. We started the Chronicle at a very bad time, but we have managed to hold our own. Since we offer our product free of charge to our readers, we rely heavily upon our advertisers to stay in business. If you like what you see, and you would like to see us continue, we ask that you patronize our advertisers as often as you can and make sure to let them know that you read about them in the Chronicle.

Steve Frank and I would like to thank all of our readers for helping us launch this website and making our first year a successful one. We appreciate the efforts of our readers and friends that have supplied us with photos and news tips. Being the "new kid on the block" we have met with some rather surprising resistance. The City of Ironwood, for example, hasn't exactly embraced the idea that we exist. Until very recently, we seldom received press releases that they automatically supply to "other media." There have been some exceptions, of course, and we appreciate those that have given us a fair shake. Ironwood Public Safety has always treated us a "real media." When there's news to report, they have readily supplied it.

Our goal has always been the same... we want to keep the people informed, and we want to do that in the most responsible way we can. News in a small area like ours can originate in the strangest places. Business happenings are news events in our eyes. We welcome retailers and industrialists to submit press releases and information to us. Because of our extremely limited staff, we can't cover as many issues as we would like. It's as simple as this... you can't be in two places at the same time!

So, thanks again for supporting and reading our website. We will continue to do our best. But, in order to accomplish our goals, we need your input. If we do something wrong, don't be afraid to call us on it. On the other hand, it never hurts to hear when you are doing things right.

Have a very happy and prosperous New Year!

Jim Albert