2016 Top Stories Countdown — No. 2: Cubs Win! Cubs Win! (And Kane County Helped)
- Editor’s Note: This is the ninth in a series counting down the top 10 Kane County Connects stories of 2016.
This is one story that’s gratifying for me personally on a lot of levels.
First and foremost, of course, was that I got to see — in my lifetime — the Cubs win a World Series. I think it’s safe to say that’s a sentiment shared by many of us here in Kane County, IL.
CREDIT: Major League Baseball
Second, folks in Kane County have a tie to the Cubs’ historic World Series victory, especially that Game 7 nailbiter. And it was fun to be able to point that out, share a few of the details — and revel in them, just a little bit.
Third, this is a story that I threw together on a whim. And the fact that it ended up as the second-most-read article of 2016 — with 9,151 page views (so far) — well, that’s almost as pleasing as a ninth-inning walk-off home run.
Local-government digital outreach, the esoteric description of what I do, isn’t like “Moneyball,” but it has some of those aspects. We use statistics and analytics to understand outcomes and make decisions. As you’ve seen in this story series, we know how many page views each article gets, what kind of content works and what doesn’t.
For the most part, the success of a KCC article involves three elements — locality, timeliness and impact. And there’s no doubt our No. 2 story had all of those qualities.
But there’s also an X Factor, and that’s one of the things that makes this job so much fun.
I didn’t write this article because I thought it was going to get a lot of page views, but I was surprised and delighted that it did.
Read More
2016 Top Stories Countdown
- No. 10: Middle School Student Threatens Shooting
- No. 9: Free Wood Chips!
- No. 8: Kane County Mourns Loss of Steve Chidester
- No. 7: The Curious Incident of the Great Galesburg Zephyr
- No. 6: Kane County’s First Modern Roundabout
- No. 5: Car Crashes Into Home on Farnsworth
- No. 4: Emergency Rail Repairs Close Randall Road
- No. 3: Kane County Resumes Electronics Recycling
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