Wayne Gretzky memories score big on Journal website
Web highlight of the week: Marking Gretzky’s Legacy
Along with the silver anniversary of the infamous Wayne Gretzky trade came the launch of the Journal’s Gretzky microsite; a veritable treasure trove of facts, figures, photos and graphics chronicling every step of the Great One’s career.
Much of the feature was reproduced in the Aug. 9 print edition (including Rick McConnell’s epic 9,000-word profile of Gretzky from minor hockey days to today) but the project came with several online-only additions: statistic infographics, branching player charts tracking the two decades it took for the trade to settle, a video timeline of milestones, and enough photo galleries to fill a bookshelf of albums. Folkiest fest: Folk Fest
A plethora of reviews and previews are standard for covering Edmonton’s premier folk music festival; this year is no exception, but in addition to all that, the Journal added the Folk Fest diaries, a series of features on days-in-the-life of key festival players. Social media highlight of the week: Urban parachutists
Granted, it got overshadowed by the two aforementioned titanic features, but for the first half of the week, it turns out the antics of a trio of Edmontonians who BASE jumped off an under-construction 36-storey downtown condominium were a popular social subject for the Journal’s Facebook and Twitter readers to bat around.
It ticks most of the boxes for virality: among them, a local subject, a potentially dangerous yet undeniably photogenic activity, and just the tiniest whiff of being an urban legend.
Small wonder it was the most-read local story on the Journal’s website … at least for the first half of the week, before Gretzky and the Folk Fest arrived on the scene. Single-service photograph of the week: “Bad boys whatcha gonna do …”
The best part of Edmonton police Const. Marc-Andre Amyotte’s cheeky mini-billboard directed to Edmonton criminals was the fact that there were several mini-pockets of the Internet fervently discussing his exact grammatical use and abuse of the Inner Circle lyrics.
This is precisely the brand of nerdery that online communities live for. The photo was actually the single most popular piece of content out of the Journal’s Facebook page; not a surprise, given its punchy visual aspect. Most photogenic chicken: Henday
In that overlap of civic pride, geography love, photography skills, and terrible puns lives Yegquest, columnist Paula Simons’s amazing chase around Edmonton in search of locations photographed with the Yegquest mascot, a plaster chicken named Henday. (I warned you about the puns.)
Yegquest (named for YEG, the city’s airport code and a popular Twitter shorthand for Edmonton) is a simple, breezy summer concept, but the number of questers who submitted their own photos for each leg of the chicken run were a good indication the enterprise wasn’t clucking up the wrong tree. Yegquest runs daily through Aug. 17.