A 2016 retrospective of NAnewsweb.com’s readership

New Albany, MS- Our 2016 retrospect covers our second full year of publication and our statistics underscore the support we have received from the community.

NAnewsweb.com officially came into being in the late fall of 2014, but did not begin full-time publishing until February, 2015. Our first year was a year of trial, learning, and adjusting, as this “stand-alone,'” on-line only publication is a fairly rare bird, especially in small towns. Most news websites are tied either to a “pen-and-ink” publication (newspaper, magazine, etc) or to a full-time broad coverage area television news site (CNN, Fox, WTVA, etc). Our site has no “pen-and-ink” or television affiliation, and is dedicated to covering items of interest to our local community.

In our second year, we have more sharply defined our audience’s preferences, added a dedicated Facebook page to our endeavor and attempted to inform the community on how best to take advantage of what NAnewsweb.com has to offer.

NAnewsweb.com’s service goals are:

• to cover major news and events of local interest in a manner that is concise, timely and relevant.
• to provide an outlet for information from local schools, organizations, charities, and individuals who have news to share with the community.
• to present a forum for the publication of local opinion.
• to present thoughtfully researched and written pieces covering a wide range of topics of general interest to our community.

Our website’s analytics software provides instantaneous feed-back to us as to how much readership each article is producing. Over the past year, based on our readership statistics, we have been able to focus our direction and energies on presenting articles that all of our readers will enjoy. Our readership comprises a great variety of tastes, and we aim to provide something that will be of interest to everyone our community. Most readers seem to prefer short pieces that are quick to read and understand, but we also have a loyal and growing number who enjoy our more lengthy in-depth pieces.

In 2016, as of midnight on New Year’s Eve, we’d posted 689 articles this year.They had received 306,869 views (up 93% from 2015) from 158,126 unique visitors (up 72% from 2015).*  Here are a few statistics about our readers:

• 65% female; 35% male
• 58% are age 25-54; 34% age 55 and over
• 71% see us on smart phones; 19% on desktop computers; 10% on tablets.
• Most readers are in the New Albany, Tupelo, Pontotoc, Amory, Oxford, Ripley and Holly Springs areas, but we also have substantial readership in places such as Hattiesburg, Starkville, Memphis and Atlanta.

Our top stories for each month were:

• January: http://nanewsweb.com/new-albany-narcotics-make-significant-drug-arrest/
• February: Methamphetamine: poisoning lives and communities
• March: Union Co. deputies searching in Ingomar for woman’s attacker
• April: NA police deal with possible bomb after Fed-Ex drops the ball
• May: NA drug roundup arrests 26
• June: NA pulling out all the stops this weekend
• July: Lightning strikes Calvary Methodist Church
• August: Armed men rob store
• September: TVA feeder failure cuts power
• October: Cracker Barrel files plans
• November: Quick response contains fire
• December: Tom Cooper battling illness

NAnewsweb.com solicits your comments and input, and encourages you to make use of the forum we offer the community during 2017.

* A “unique visitor” is one who is viewing the website for the first time on any given day. If that person returns at a later time on the same day and views several more articles, the views are counted in the article statistics, but the “visitor” is only counted once per day.