Misty Franklin’s Long Goodbye resonates with Journal readers
Web highlight of the week: The Long Goodbye part III
Misty Franklin, the woman left quadriplegic after an attack more than a decade ago, once again captured the hearts and minds of Edmonton Journal readers this past week. The subject of the twopart feature by Journal reporter Jana Pruden in December 2013, Misty’s re-entrance into the news occurred when she turned off her ventilator on Jan. 28. Over 380,000 page views, 1,300 Facebook recommendations, and a massive influx of reader support accompanied the story of a woman who finally chose to die. The other top website read was also tragic in nature — it was the obituary for a local punk musician struck and killed by a car on Whyte Avenue on Jan. 27.
Interesting Oilers Factoid One
Talking about the Oilers in these weekly recaps is tricky because of their constancy in the average news cycle. Despite them hanging around the bottom rungs of the NHL for the last several seasons, their page views and online presence remain as robust as their ticket sales. The Journal’s Cult of Hockey blog remains one of the top blogs in the Postmedia chain. So a week in which the team pulls off the rare three-in-a-row winning streak is surprising because the page views and online chatter about the team saw a sharp uptick from the already solid numbers.
This week, the centrepiece was new goaltender Ben Scrivens’ record-breaking Jan. 29 game, which essentially functioned as his debut for local Internet fans, who responded with a solid 70,000 Journal page views. No one is buying pallets of Stanley Cup polish just yet, but it’s an interesting reminder from the online community, that while interest in the team is high, it could easily be so much higher if they were, you know, winning. Interesting Oilers Factoid Two
Of the 70,000 page views for the aforementioned Oilers recap, fewer than five percent were from mobile sources.
Considering that mobile traffic has eclipsed desktop sources for most of the top stories in 2014, this is a curious anomaly. The Long Goodbye III, for instance, received 56 per cent of its web traffic from mobile devices, which is already on the low side.