Thanks for a record month!

Normally, Summer is the slow time for local politics.  Fewer public meetings and fewer big decisions lead to fewer good stories.  Typically, the budget gets wrapped up in early June, and that's about it.

Not this year though.  June turned out to be the all time best month for aShortChronicle.

June set a record in monthly page views and also contained the best all time week and best all time day of the last 4 1/2 years.

June bested the previous monthly record of page views by a whopping 33%.  The previous record was set last November in the runup to the municipal elections.

What's interesting about these numbers is that even when removing the record day, it still would have been a record month by a significant double-digit percentage margin (15%).  Said another way, the record month was not solely driven by this outlier, but instead was driven by increased average daily readership.

That's something that bodes well for the future.

Thanks go out to all of you who read, provide tips and backgrpund information, and share the stories here at aShortChronicle.

Sometimes these stories rub people the wrong way, something evidenced by the pushback some of them receive.  However, by comparison the overwhelmingly positive feedback makes dealing with the naysayers all worthwhile.

Thanks again!  Your support is greatly appreciated!

Post 300 and a New Direction

Post 300...

In the nearly three year run for this blog, it has covered a lot of topics.  Good government and transparency top the list of things getting the most enthusiastic attention.  Elections and candidates have made for interesting subjects.  Then there have been the big infrastructure projects like the Red Line and the HOT lanes - projects that are by their very nature political.  I've also picked on some of our local media and their coverage of events.

By covering the minutia of how government works and how the media covers it, hopefully that has shown a little light on things for readers  It is often pretty clear when a post hits a nerve based on comments and emails it receives.  More subtly, every now and then, small positive changes can be seen in how local government works on topics covered here.  Seeing that makes the time spent well worth it.

But let me be really clear about one thing, what I do here is not "journalism".  I don't try to hide where I'm coming from on topics.   Rather than journalism, I would describe it as editorial mixed with bit of satire and a side of educated citizen activism.  It is not just journalists who have the right and responsibility to keep an eye on what our public officials are doing.  That is really the responsibility of all of us .

Some in our local media seem to be confused on that last point.

Some, but not all...

You may have noticed that the recent post on the NMRW meeting with Thom Tillis was in the latest Herald Weekly.  We hope that will be a regular occurrence going forward for the foreseeable future in the form of a weekly column on the subjects we normally cover here.

A big thanks goes out to the folks at the Herald for giving me the opportunity.  This should in no way change the topics we cover, but it may change the timing of when certain posts go up here.  It will be an interesting challenge, and I am definitely looking forward to it.

Post 200...Observations on writing a blog

200 posts...

That's a lot more than I thought I would have written at this point - almost 3 posts a week for nearly 16 months straight.  Over the course of those posts I've learned a few things about the process of how to do this, and believe me, it is a process.  Some things totally make sense when you think about them.  Some are odd and a bit counter-intuitive, but they also strike me as interesting.

Here are the top 4...

1.  Publish Regularly -  This probably sounds obvious, but trying to publish new posts on the same days of the week on a regular basis seems to improve readership.  At the beginning, posts came rather haphazardly whenever something came up.  Once I started trying to be more consistent sticking to days of the week, readership on those days improved.  To that end, recently you may have noticed aShortChronicle posts are coming out Monday/Wednesday/Friday (or more accurately, late the evenings before).  That seems to work well and will probably be the plan going forward.

2.  Promote Posts Consistently - New posts get put on Facebook and Twitter immediately and linked to comments on related stories on other web publications such as other blogs or news sites.  Hat tip to David Boraks from DavidsonNews.net for explaining to me the different ways to use Twitter and Facebook for getting out a story.  Promoting one's own stories may seem a little self-serving, but then again if nobody knows they're there nobody is going to read them.

Now, for some of the less obvious...

3.  Patience is a Virtue even in Web News - Sometimes, waiting for a story to develop is better than blasting something out just to be "first".  I can't tell you how many times I've waited on printing something just to see how it played out.  Waiting always pays off rather than really embarrassing oneself by spouting off like bloggers have a bad reputation of doing.  I've learned that the hard-way a couple of times.  Writing a "correction" or a "retraction" is not what you want to be doing with any sort of regularity.

4.  Never expect a story to get a lot of page views.  The web will always surprise you. - The stories I've expected or wanted to get a large number of hits almost never do, and the ones that have gotten the most come out of left field.  Three of the top four posts since writing this blog fall into that category of  being a "surprise".

• One was the story about a Stand Up North Carolina meeting in Mooresville featuring talk show personality, Vince Coakley.  Soon after that story, Vince Coakley was taken off the air at WBT Radio and that story got a huge number of hits for people searching on him. 
• Another in that same category was this piece about the dustup between Governor McCrory and Charlotte City Council over the proposed Charlotte Streetcar.  That story got a bunch of hits weeks later when Mayor Anthony Foxx was selected as the nominee for Transportation Secretary.
• The most read story in the history of aShortChronicle remains "HOT Lanes: The Empire Strikes Back".  That maybe should not be that much of a surprise considering how passionate people feel about this toll road project, but what is surprising is how that one story almost single-handedly changed readership patterns for the blog.  Enough people read that one story on a wide enough scale that daily page views have stayed almost double than before it was published - even on days when there isn't a new post.

For anyone else who writes a blog or is thinking of starting, as a testament that #1 and #2 work, readership of aShortChronicle gauged in page hits has nearly quadrupled since January of this year when I started doing both of these things with some regularity.  However, as important as these are, a bigger lesson may be to  just keep writing and trying to find interesting stories presented from different angles than the more traditional media.  You never know which one will take off and be a game changer.

Check out the new "Blogger's Chronicle" page at the top of the blog for other posts on writing the blog.

aShortChronicle turns one year old! How are we doing?

One year ago today, I hit the "Publish" button on the first post of this blog.  I had no idea where it would go or how it would be received.  To say the least, I have been humbled by the response.

Thank you!

If you'd asked me what I hoped to achieve by writing a blog about local politics with a focus on tiny Davidson, I'm not sure what my answer would have been a year ago.  But today, looking back on this past year this is what I'd say. 

Give people the whole truth while making a point and hopefully it will make a little bit of a difference.

So, how are we doing?  Honestly, in just one year I think we've achieved quite a lot.

I say "we" because this whole effort would not be possible without all of the people who have sent in story ideas, provided background information, and helped point me in the right direction.

Over the past year...

Posts from aShortChronicle have become regularly featured on PunditHouse.com as part of their "House Guests" columns.  PunditHouse is the website for stories on Charlotte area politics from the conservative point of view.  Being asked to submit as a House Guest was a nice surprise and acknowledgement that these stories may be worth reading.  Thanks to Christian Hine for reaching out.

Here in Davidson, I'm confident in saying that posts from aShortChronicle had at least some impact on the Town's decision in 2012 to abandon efforts to pursue 4-year terms for elected officials.  Was this blog the whole reason they dropped the issue? No, absolutely not.  Did it make a little bit of a difference? Yes, I'm absolutely sure that it did.

Finally, I'm proud of a couple of posts which covered some slightly off-beat topics weeks earlier than the local media and the more traditional pundits.  It's nice to see that some of what's covered here is deemed newsworthy by those who make covering the news their business.  See...

• Bring Back Partisan Judicial Races or Can the Races All Together aShortChronicle 11/30/2012 VS. Hood: Reform appellate election system John Hood of the John Locke Foundation, January 2013
• Davidson Village...Last Bastion for Democrats in the LKN Area aShortChronicle 10/17/2012 VS. Precinct 206 parts Lake Norman's otherwise sea of red Lake Norman Citizen 11/16/2012

(Incidentally, on January 31st the NC Senate introduced bill S39 to reinstate partisan judicial races on only it's 2nd day in session.)

Now, if we could just get the "real" media to dig a little deeper on some other important stories we'll really be getting somewhere!

However, my guess is that if you want to get the whole story on some topics you are going to have to continue looking elsewhere.  Hopefully, aShortChronicle will continue to be one of those places.  With municipal elections, major transportation infrastructure issues, and the business as usual government chicanery, year two promises to provide plenty of good stories.