By Lori Grisham, J-Lab Intern
New Era News boasts substantial web traffic despite its fledgling status. Since its launch in April 2010, New Era News, an online source of politics and news focused on Boulder and Denver, Co., has had more than 40,000 unique visitors.
“The vast majority of our readership is within Colorado and mostly come from the front range areas of Boulder and Denver,” said Steve Fenberg, founder and executive director of New Era Colorado and the New Era Colorado Foundation.
Of the total number of visits, 67 percent are first-time visitors and 33 percent are return visitors. “Since our site has only been live for less than a year, we expect to have more new visitors than returning visitors,” Fenberg said. New Era News initially focused on bringing new eyes to the site, but moving forward that goal will start to shift, he said. New Era hopes to retain a higher percentage of return visitors in the future.
To keep readers coming back, New Era News has been thinking of ways to keep content fresh and innovative.
It continues to recruit new writers to keep a variety of voices on the site. “We currently have about 10 active writers that produce content at least weekly,” Fenberg said. Another dozen writers supplement this work with occasional content.
And New Era News recently purchased flip cameras to encourage interns to produce small-scale online videos. “These short videos will track the legislature, city council decisions, and other local community and political news,” Fenberg said. “We’ll have the ability to embed these videos on other websites around the state, thus placing our content in front of new readers.”
Internally, New Era News is also making a push to increase Facebook fans. “We hope for this to translate into increased readership and traffic of the website,” Fenberg said.
As New Era News looks to the future, funding will be important to the success of the site and they have experienced challenges jump-starting the an online advertising program. “Although we’ve put together sales packets, promotional materials and approached several local businesses in the area, we haven’t seen very much interest so far,” Fenberg said. Most businesses are cutting back on advertising budgets, which has made it difficult, he said.
But in In the new year, Fenberg plans to take on this challenge as well. “Next year we will begin to have New Era Colorado’s Development Coordinator work on this program in an attempt to make it more effective,” he said.
