Melissa Nunez
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Melissa Nunez is a journalism sophomore and Mustang News community outreach director.
It would be easy to just post stories and not care what happens after. But in an era when people are able to read breaking news on the same website as headlines about the Kardashians, it’s important to see where our traffic is coming from, what stories are most popular and how many page views each story garners.
Thanks to Google Analytics, we are able to see and demonstrate data behind MustangNews.net from the past year.
(hover over to see pageview numbers)
As we can see, people read MustangNews.net all over the world — not just my own family in Peru.
But besides our impressive website analytics, it has been a pretty good award season for the Mustang News editorial staff.
Back in November, we brought home 14 awards from the 93rd Annual ACP/CMA National College Media Convention. One of those was the ACP Online Pacemaker — considered by many to be the highest honor in college media.
This past February, our staff attended the Associated Collegiate Press’ 31st Annual National Journalism Convention at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Los Angeles, where the staff attended workshops on reporting, design, social media, broadcast and photography. The convention included the California College Media Awards banquet dinner where we received 19 awards in total, including seven first-place plaques.
Most recently, on May 9, Mustang News received five awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association at the 2014 Better Newspaper Contest in Coronado, CA. The awards were for Campus Excellence in Journalism:
- 1st place – Feature Story
- 1st place – Editorial Comment
- 1st place – Website
- 2nd place – Sports Photo
- 2nd place – Writing
2014-15 has been quite a year here at Mustang News. As our editor-in-chief Jacob Lauing said, “this was a rebuilding year.”
Our mission is to report the news and our goal is to write what our audience wants to read. Of course, we don’t always succeed, but learning from our mistakes is just part of the job. As former editor-in-chief J.J. Jenkins said, “all that failing and flailing is why Mustang News succeeded.”
The best way to improve is to hear from our readers. If there is something you want us to cover or improve on, don’t be afraid to reach out. So here’s to hoping that the following year bring us even stronger analytics and more awards.