In an effort to increase traffic to AltWeeklies.com, and thus to member papers' Web sites, AAN modified the story-sharing Web site today to display two slightly different versions of the home page for different audiences. AAN members who are logged in will still be greeted by a home page featuring every story posted on the site, while the general public will only see content that has been selected with the general user in mind. In addition, AAN is running AltWeeklies.com ads on blogs and at the South by Southwest Festival.
Ruth Hammond will be stepping down as AAN's editorial director on Dec. 23 to take a job as a senior copy editor with The Chronicle of Higher Education. During her two years at AAN, Ruth participated in the launch of AltWeeklies.com and kept the site running; she also administered the AltWeekly Awards contest, including the contest's move to an online format last year. In reflecting on her work at AAN, Ruth says, "what strikes me most is how much teamwork went into all my projects."
A 33 percent increase in the monthly traffic count enabled AAN's collaborative news site to pass the quarter-million mark in unique visitors. AltWeeklies.com traffic has increased exponentially since April, when the number of unique visitors was less than 10,000. Most of that growth has come from AAN members who run AltWeeklies.com teasers, which have also increased traffic on their own sites.
For the first time, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' story-sharing site, AltWeeklies.com, has exceeded 100,000 unique visitors in a month. The rapid growth in traffic could have a positive impact on every paper that posts stories to AltWeeklies.
A year ago, AltWeeklies.com was a fledgling Web site with just a hundred stories, intent on escaping the notice of many visitors besides the AAN editors who would buy and sell stories there. Now it is an active news site with more than 4,400 stories and a readership that is rapidly growing.
The most-viewed story on AAN's collaborative news site, AltWeeklies.com, is "Porn, Hypocrisy, Plagiarism: The Dark Side of Jacksonville's Daily," which appeared in the Oct. 12, 2004, edition of Folio Weekly. Written by freelancer Billee Bussard, it accused Florida Times-Union's then-editorial page editor Lloyd Brown of -- among other things -- staring at porn in the workplace and plagiarism. Brown came under fire and stepped down from the daily, only to be hired as a speechwriter by Gov. Jeb Bush (the day after Bush fired a top official over sexual harassment allegations). Now the St. Petersburg Times reports that Brown has stepped down from that post as well.
For years, editors of AAN papers talked about having a Web site they could use to buy articles from each other in a pinch. This year DesertNet built them the site, AltWeeklies.com. Over the summer, editors filled the story-sharing site with news articles, commentary and reviews. And now AAN's director of sales and marketing, Roxanne Cooper, is promoting AltWeeklies.com to the public with the hope of building a broader online audience for all AAN papers.
