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Transparency report – May

D'ish

Transparency report – May

A ringing endorsement if there ever was.
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A ringing endorsement if there ever was.

A ringing endorsement if there ever was.

This post has been updated.

The month of May marked our one year anniversary, and we celebrated it in fine fashion.

JimRomenesko.com and Poynter.org mentioned Decaturish.com twice in two weeks. They’re industry-publications, and just as likely to call you out for making an embarrassing goof  as they are to highlight your reporting.

Thankfully we fared OK in all four mentions. I won’t rehash the individual controversies involved, but I’m glad we got noticed for the right reasons. Thank you to both publications for giving us a shout out and thanks to our readers who contacted them.

Contributions trickled in, and that’s fine. We received $75, up slightly from the $52.50 we received in April. As I’ve said before, I never wanted us to be a donation-driven publication. It’s probably time to remove the donation button completely, but I keep hoping some mysterious stranger who talks like Daniel Plainview in “There Will be Blood” will become a generous benefactor. If I ever win the lottery, so many people are going to rue the day. I’ll probably keep doing the same thing, but I’ll build an army of reporter robots to assist me.

Comic Book fantasies aside, we received enough money to cover our initial start up costs and set things in motion. We couldn’t have done that without your help, whether you gave $10 or a $100. Now please spend that money with our advertisers and tell them it’s because they were smart enough to support local journalism, allowing us to provide you news for free.

Our web traffic held up pretty well. We had approximately 142,000 page views and 42,000 unique visitors. Last month, we had 148,000 page views, a new record, and 49,555 unique views, our second best ever. Of course, I want to set new records every month, but I want a lot of things (like robot reporter armies). People get busy. Memorial Day happens. School lets out. The days are longer. But our core audience remains intact, and that’s good news – particularly if you’re an advertiser.

Some other stats of note from May: 57 percent of our audience is male, and 43 percent is female. The age of our average reader is between 35 and 44. About 21,240 of our visits came from users in the city of Decatur and 15,137 came from the city of Atlanta. We received 3,329 visits from Augusta, 1,890 from North Decatur and 1,089 from Sandy Springs, which makes me go d’awww.

How can you help keep this party going?

–  Consider buying an ad. We encourage our readers to support businesses that advertise with us. We have an ad salesman, Jeff Cochran, who helps us keep editorial content separated from our ads. If you’re a local business and you like what we do, you should call Jeff. He can be reached at 404-441-7389 

– Support businesses that advertise with us. Click on their ads. Buy stuff from them. Tell them you heard about their business when you saw their ad on Decaturish. (Special side note here: re:loom is an ad we run for free as part of our commitment to the re:loom project, a jobs training program for homeless adults. I am a member of the board of directors for re:loom’s parent organization, the Initiative for Affordable Housing. It’s an unpaid position. They do give us free chicken nuggets and Oreo cookies at our regular board meetings, but that’s about it. You should totally support them, too.)

– Follow us and share us on social media. Our Facebook page cracked 1,300 likes in May.  Our Twitter account has 557 followers (and counting).

 Donate to Decaturish, particularly if you are crazy, rich and talk like Daniel Plainview. The button is in the lower right hand side of your screen, if you’re using a desktop computer. But really, you should support businesses that advertise with us. That helps more.

I’m looking forward to another great month. Thanks again to our readers and advertisers for supporting community journalism.

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