December 8, 2006Happy Birthday, TimesCast
From left (back): Seth Gitner, Orr Shtuhl, Marques Harper, Tad Dickens, Patrick Beeson, Daine Vineyard. From left (front): Dwayne Yancey, Jenny Kincaid Boone, Lindsey Nair, Cindy Porter, Tamara Gaskin. It was a year ago today that the TimesCast made its official debut. Below is the first of several postings by Dwayne Yancey, who's worn many hats in this first year: director, writer, creative mind, scheduler, teleprompter runner, background sound effects, grim reaper on Halloween ... you get the idea: "How’s it going, one year later?" When The Roanoke Times launched its daily webcast, The TimesCast, a year ago, the feedback was immediate: "Better than the Naked News,"one viewer wrote in. Don’t say we don’t listen to our audience -- because this week, as our year-anniversary approached, we featured a naked weatherman. Well, OK, he was clothed. But he was formerly naked -- the meteorologist for one of the local TV stations had been fired recently when a nude photo of himself turned up on the Internet. And this week, he was our featured guest on the TimesCast, making fun of his predicament the same way some bigger celebrity might make the rounds of the late-night talk shows to explain away some indiscretion with a few laughs. OK, maybe that’s just a cheap ploy for the search engines -- hey, how often do get the phrase "naked weatherman"? But here’s the serious news about our webcast, which seems to have become one of the most talked-about projects in the world of online journalism. (Note that being talked-about doesn’t necessarily signify universal approval: Even in our newsroom, you can find those who consider the TimesCast either: a) a bold investment in a future of media convergence, or b) a hare-brained waste of time and resources.) I think pretty well, but I’ll let you decide: * The key measurement, of course, is traffic. And obviously, the day before we launched, our traffic stood at zero. By April, we were averaging about 250 pageviews per weekday. By November, we were routinely averaging about 400 to 500 pageviews each weekday, with a trendline that zigs and zags like the stock market but is generally pointed upwards. Our busiest days have topped 1,000 pageviews. We've topped that mark a few times: when we aired video of the Marcus Vick "stomp" at the Gator Bowl last January, the above-mentioned cameo by a former weatherman and when we've had special promotions and giveaways. * Perhaps you’d like to slice the figures on a monthly basis? Sure thing. In April, we logged 6,639 pageviews. In October, we cracked the 12,000 pageviews-per-month mark for the first time. In November, we cracked it again, even though the Thanksgiving holiday cost us several days worth of traffic by our most loyal viewers -- people surfing the ‘net from their offices late in the afternoon. Related links:
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