Alberta flooding coverage dominates website traffic
Highlight of the week: Calgary flooding
When multiple rivers in southern Alberta overran their banks late last week, it threw many communities — including a swath through the middle of Calgary — into local states of emergency. The stories, pictures and videos started streaming in on the morning of June 20, captivating visitors to edmontonjournal.com.
How big was the flooding story, from an online perspective? Well, consider the tornado warnings that central Alberta experienced on June 12. The Journal website got just as many page views that day as it did on June 20 (roughly 640,000) and that day’s event directly concerned Edmonton. Even adjacent to the flooding, the readership was tremendous.
Traffic to the Journal’s website was only a fraction of what the Calgary Herald saw (and with good reason: our sister paper to the south generated terrific news coverage, not to mention providing first-hand accounts of their escapes from flooded cars).
On June 20, almost 200,000 total page views came to the primary flooding story, the constantly updated article studded with links and a live blog of Tweets from those affected and those reporting on the situation.
The coverage didn’t stop at the boundaries of the Journal’s website. Via all the Journal’s various social media networks — Twitter, Reddit, Storify — the story exploded as well in various ways. Thanks to prolific sharing, 27,000 Facebook users interacted with a photo gallery on edmontonjournal.com of a man and his cat swimming to safety. In context: that is more than twice the number of Facebook fans the Edmonton Journal actually has. Edmonton getting a tornado warning only reached 22,000 readers. A followup story profiling both the man and the cat (who survived and dried off) followed the photo gallery on June 21. Honorary mention of the week: The divorce house
The only story that came close to the flooding was a viral pickup of a My House Beautiful column from early June about a divorced couple who created a conjoined house for their kids. Relinks from a plethora of aggregator sites netted the story 300,000 website page views and 140,000 mobile page views — on June 17. Still, the architecture crowd was swept away by the time Thursday morning rolled around.