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Last year, during my tenure as online editor-in-chief, viewership on the website increased significantly. By promoting brand cohesion, introducing new widgets, emphasizing story awards and more, we increased viewership by 63,000 and our number of individual users by 35,000. 

MARKETING AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT 

MARKETING AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT 

SOCIAL MEDIA-WEBSITE COHESION 

STORIES OF THE WEEK

Last year, I worked with our social media team to regularly put up a "stories of the week" post, which highlighted five online stories from the previous week. Our posts regularly earned around 600 impressions and generated double digit visits to our profile, where we linked the articles mentioned in the "stories of the week" post. As the year went on, our posts saw an increased level of engagement. 

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INSTAGRAM WIDGET

We also added a widget to the side of our page which displays our recent Instagram posts. This addition not only created more cohesion between our online content and social media, but also added more visual appeal to our front page.

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FEATURED STORIES ON TWITTER

We often use Twitter to highlight certain stories that have been posted online. For example, after we published our story reflecting on one year of the pandemic, I worked with our social media team to feature it on Twitter. The post ended up accumulating nearly 3,000 impressions and 150 engagements.

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2019-20 SCHOOL YEAR

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2020-21 SCHOOL YEAR

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PRINT-WEBSITE COHESION 

MATCHING LOGOS

As mentioned in the Web Design section, we changed the logo on the front page of our website to match the one in the print magazine. This made it easier for our audience to draw a connection between the online and print editions of tjTODAY.

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CURRENT ISSUE WIDGET

Additionally, we added a widget to the side of the page highlighting the most recent tjTODAY print issue. While magazine issues were already being hosted on the website, viewers previously had to click on a small menu item at the top of the front page to find them. By more prominently displaying the magazine on our front page, we made it more likely that our 80,000 web users would find the print issue.

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BEST OF SNO AWARDS

As online editor-in-chief, I placed an emphasis on earning Best of SNO awards, as I knew that getting published on bestofsno.com would help our own website gain visibility. While I am proud of tjTODAY's online viewership, I also recognize that bestofsno.com gets significantly more traffic than we do (as shown in the graph on the left). 

 

By submitting to the contest regularly and pushing for us to include secondary elements in our articles, I helped tjTODAY earn 22 Best of SNO awards during the 2020-21 school year. Before that, our last Best of SNO award had come in September of 2014. Accordingly to Google Analytics, our appearances on bestofsno.com during the 2020-21 school year were responsible for 648 of our website's new users over the last year.

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Every time we won an award, our articles were also featured on Best of SNO's Twitter page, which has 4,222 followers. tjTODAY, in comparison, has 1,069 followers on Twitter. The increased platform that the BestofSNO Twitter page gave us likely helped both our social media and website content gain more traffic.  

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TRENDING STORIES WIDGET

Our final major change to the website to improve engagement was the addition of the trending stories widget. In place of the "New on tjTODAY" widget, which we felt was redundant, we decided to highlight the most-viewed tjTODAY stories of the last 30 days. From our experience reading multiple other student and professional publications, we knew that a Trending Stories widget would compel users to view more content on the website. 

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ONLINE DESIGN TEAM

With the pandemic making it more difficult to take photos for articles, we noticed many staffers using screenshots of meetings or announcements for their featured images. However, screenshots lacked visual appeal and did little to engage a reader and get them to click on the article. To address this, I and my fellow online EICs formed and recruited members for the tjTODAY online design team. This team was tasked with creating featured images for articles when there were no better alternatives. Below are some of the featured images that the design team produced over the last year:

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*ILLUSTRATION BY AAFREEN ALI

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*ILLUSTRATION BY AAFREEN ALI

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*ILLUSTRATION BY RACHEL LEWIS

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*ILLUSTRATION BY KEERTANA SENTHILKUMAR

STARTUP MONDAY

Because our yearbook package is successful enough to fund all aspects of TJ Media, tjTODAY does not rely on advertising or business partnerships to secure funding. My first taste of the business aspect of journalism thus came as an intern at ARLNow, where I was in charge of writing the Startup Monday Column. The objective of Startup Monday, which was sponsored by a local real estate company, was to highlight the successes' of Arlington businesses. Below are some of the articles that I wrote for the column:

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*PHOTO COURTESY OF OLYMPIC MEDIA

Rosslyn-Based Advertising Firm Ranks as 13th Fastest-Growing Company in U.S

In this article, I wrote about Olympic Media, which had been named the 13th fastest growing company in the U.S. I made sure to contact the company spokesperson while also including important background information about the company. 

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*PHOTO COURTESY OF INTEROS

Ballston-Based Interos Becomes Arlington's First Startup Unicorn

To write this article, I contacted founder of Interos for an interview while also conducting research into the company's growth over the last two years. Eventually, I compiled the information into an engaging, business-centered article.

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*PHOTO COURTESY OF OSTENDIO

Rosslyn Startup Ostendio Completes Major Round of Funding

For my very first Startup Monday article, I wrote about a Rosslyn company that had recently pulled in a significant amount of funding. While writing this article, I had to research technical business terms before figuring out how to explain them in a way that made sense for most readers. Though I struggled at first, after working with my editor, I managed to write a clear and concise introduction the article.

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