The Orion--CENSORED!

For Week 11:

It's awesome to have stories from The Orion get picked up on Google News. In fact, Google News is one of biggest referrers to The Orion's Web site.

In fact, on many search terms concerning the Matthew Carrington, The Orion will often be shown higher in relevance than a certain local professional daily.

But, I saw something today on Google News that made me wonder what exactly is going on, and how often people are getting the full story on Google.

My column, The Online Lines, runs on the site every Sunday. Today, my column argued in favor of Proposition 73, which would amend the state constitution and require notifying the parent or guardian of a minor wishing to receive an abortion.

When my column shows up on Google News (run a search on "Proposition 73" (with the quotation marks, and look by date) this is how some accompanying text taken from my column reads:

What's your position on Proposition 73, which would require parental notification for minors wanting an abortion? Didn't enjoy it? ...

Not really anything that intresting, except for one thing. The first question and second question shown aren't right next to each other, but are in fact seperated by 60 words. A portion of those words included lyrics of a song yelled at anti-abortion demonstrators that people could likely find offensive. Normally, when leaving a section like that out, it would require using an ellipsis (...)

Here's how the first part of my column actually reads:

What's your position on Proposition 73, which would require parental notification for minors wanting an abortion?

If your answer was no, try to comfortably sing these song lyrics—sung toward pro-life demonstrators at the March for Life in January—to the tune of "Jesus Loves the Little Children:"

Jesus should have been aborted,
Mary wanted a career.
Abortion is a woman's right,
So we won't give up the fight,
Until you Christian assholes go away.

Didn't enjoy it? Maybe you even found it repulsive?

Needless to say, I was really stunned when I saw this. I had no idea Google censors portions of what shows up on their news pages.

This is an interesting jump-off point for a lot of questions: What does Google decide to censor? Who determines what is censored? How often do they censor? Have they ever received a complaint about censoring?

It's really shocking, and I'll probably cross-post to The Orion Blog later, with some editing.

Changes...

I get regular access to The Orion's online readership numbers. I've noticed a real change in our readership for October.

While I won't give exact numbers, in September The Orion had almost 80,000 unique visitors and over 280,000 page views.

For October, the number of visitors will be only around 60 percent of September's numbers, but the page views should be about the same.

This means, while fewer people went to The Orion's Web site, those who did viewed more pages.

I'm torn as to if I should see this as a positive step or not. I'm disappointed about losing all those unique viewers. However, I'm thrilled that the overall viewing of the site hasn't decreased along with that. Keeping the page views up can encourage local online advertising (as long as I keep on the business department about that).

Of course, the business department is also in negotiation to potentially purchase TheOrion.com from its current Canadian owner that doesn't use the domain, so keep fingers crossed and knock on wood about that.

What we can learn from others.

This past Sunday and Monday, I was in Las Vegas, Nev. for the Society of Professional Journalists national convention at Aladdin Hotel & Casino.

The idea of my attending the convention was to accept on behalf of The Orion staff the Mark of Excellence Award for the best all-around weekly newspaper in the country published once a week.

The awards were presented at a luncheon (The "eon" at the end of "lunch" can be translated to mean "super-fancy event that makes my redneck ass feel awkward") on Monday afternoon.

Sitting at my table was yours truly, a grad student from USC, three staffers from the Daily Wildcat at the University of Arizona, and four students from Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.

The students from BSU had won the Mark of Excellence Award for best all-around independent online student publication for Ball Bearings.

This site is, pretty much, amazing. It's what Cat Bytes could be if we had the same amount of time to devote to it.

Ball Bearings uses a real package format with their stories. There's text, photos, video, and interactive components with the stories.

Something that can very frustrating to Chico State students, being in a journalism program that puts so much focus on writing, is to see the writing not necessarily be the centerpiece of a story, particuarly in a Web magazine.

But, as Ball Bearings shows, that's not necessarily bad.

Oh, and we all came to a concensus that there should have been a hamburger/hot dog option for lunch as opposed to poached salmon with asparagus tips, boiled eggs, Russian salad and sturgeon caviar.

Beat the clock

There's a saying on The Orion's mission statement that reads "Get it first, but first get it right." I've been discovering, in the world of online journalism, the first part is specifically true.

I'm a pretty competitive guy, and journalism is a competitive field. The Orion's attitude is that not only should it be competing with the other local publications, we should be breaking stories on campus. Even if other publications print sooner or more often than The Orion does.

A good example of this that happened this week was the story dealing with the shooting in front of Normal Street Bar. A photographer was listening to the scanner at the time that the police call came across. He then started the phone tag, which eventually led to the story being posted online within a few hours of the shooting.

I can't take any credit for this, because I wasn't on this particular phone tree. But, there's still the joy in the fact that, for 16 hours, The Orion Online was the only news source for the shooting, until the Enterprise-Record printed.

Of course, they did get a little revenge by beating out The Orion on reporting a plea bargain in the Chi Tau trial, compliments of having a full-time courtroom reporter.

Online allows a weekly newspaper like The Orion to go toe-to-toe with a daily paper. Online journalism doesn't have to wait for a print run, so in cyberspace, The Orion can essentially be a daily newspaper, even if print only comes out once every seven days.