The Smedias and an focal

auldpooky

Does anyone know how an Focal did at the smedias ?

Delta Kilo

Havent heard anything yet, which probably means they were unsuccessful.

Saw this article earlier though
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0427/1224315233859.html

auldpooky

Thats pretty disappointing. I was hoping an focal would win because I have contributed a few articles to the paper this year and really thought that they stood a good chance

wnolan1992

As far as I'm aware UL got none this year. But am open to correction on that as I was only following the event on Twitter.

Really disappointing. Really thought An Focal stood a chance for Newspaper Of the Year, and thought Kelly would sneak the Editor award.

And DCU won 7 awards..... FUUUU-!

Carol.Lillie

I heard KOB won best facebook comment of the year in the short fiction section.

Carol.Lillie

anyone know where I can read the short story hospital? by dearbhaille

wnolan1992

Carol.Lillie wrote: »

I heard KOB won the Best Short Fiction award for her Facebook posts.

FYP.

Honestly, trolls these days...

Why would the Smedias have a seperate section in Short Fiction specifically for Facebook posts? Gawd loike!

Delta Kilo

wnolan1992 wrote: »

FYP.

Honestly, trolls these days...

Why would the Smedias have a seperate section in Short Fiction specifically for Facebook posts? Gawd loike!

wnolan1992

Carol.Lillie wrote: »

anyone know where I can read the short story hospital? by dearbhaille

Not sure if it's the same one, but there's a story called "Hospital" by Dearbhaile Houston in Cellar Door.

http://issuu.com/ulsu/docs/ulsu_cellar_door_vol1_issue1

Bored Accountant

From An Focal Facebook page.
They won the following 2 awards:

Best Short Story for Dearbhaile Houston, who was published in Cellar Door.

Rowan Gallagher wins National Media Journalist of the Year.

Fishooks12

wnolan1992 wrote: »

As far as I'm aware UL got none this year. But am open to correction on that as I was only following the event on Twitter.

Really disappointing. Really thought An Focal stood a chance for Newspaper Of the Year, and thought Kelly would sneak the Editor award.

And DCU won 7 awards..... FUUUU-!

Rowan Gallagher, 4th year journalism student, won the prestigious national journalist of the year

An focal won't be winning anything apart from maybe the peoples choice award in its current form.

The majority of it is not journalism, in fact the sports section is embarrassing, nothing about actual college sport and mostly self-satisfying articles on The Premiership. the design is fairly pedestrian too

I was hoping that Jason Kennedy would get a shot at comm officer considering he's a journalism student but it wasn't to be.

Fishooks12

Bored Accountant wrote: »

From An Focal Facebook page.
They won the following 2 awards:

Best Short Story for Dearbhaile Houston, who was published in Cellar Door.

Rowan Gallagher wins National Media Journalist of the Year.

Rowan doesn't write for an focal. He's a journalism student, features regularly in the Irish Times and Indo

Bored Accountant

Fishooks12 wrote: »

in fact the sports section is embarrassing, nothing about actual college sport and mostly self-satisfying articles on The Premiership.

Even when we do send in articles about college sporting events they put them in the clubs & socs part and not in the actual sporting section.

Fishooks12

Bored Accountant wrote: »

Even when we do send in articles about college sporting events they put them in the clubs & socs part and not in the actual sporting section.

TST is great for actual college sports

The sports editor Enda Dowling is on Erasmus at the mo but he'll be more than happy for more reporters come September I'd say!

Bored Accountant

Fishooks12 wrote: »

TST is great for actual college sports

The sports editor Enda Dowling is on Erasmus at the mo but he'll be more than happy for more reporters come September I'd say!

He should send out an email to all PRO's when he comes back and get them to send on articles. Cause with an Focal, its nearly 2 weeks later before they get published, and then put up on the website, whereas they can put them up straight away when there relevant and in date.

wnolan1992

Bored Accountant wrote: »

He should send out an email to all PRO's when he comes back and get them to send on articles. Cause with an Focal, its nearly 2 weeks later before they get published, and then put up on the website, whereas they can put them up straight away when there relevant and in date.

Just on that, you can register for anfocal.ie and submit articles via that as well if you wanted them to be up sooner. Though it did take over a week to publish my submission last time...

Bored Accountant

wnolan1992 wrote: »

Just on that, you can register for anfocal.ie and submit articles via that as well if you wanted them to be up sooner. Though it did take over a week to publish my submission last time...

I presume someone still has to check the articles before there posted? so the same as being emailed in really!

wnolan1992

Bored Accountant wrote: »

I presume someone still has to check the articles before there posted? so the same as being emailed in really!

Well, in theory the sub-eds just have to give a quick read through, and hit publish, and it's on the site straight away. So not really the same because when you email you'll have to wait until the next issue.

Whether this happens in practice I can't say, I've only submitted one article.

KellingtonDawg

Hi guys!

Yup, UL only received two awards at the Smedias this week - Dearbhaile Houston for her short story in Cellar Door and Rowan Gallagher for his national journalism. I'm very happy for both of them, they were over the moon about the recognition and it was a great night!

Though An Focal didn't win anything, it's important to note just how many UL shortlists there were this year. I can't say for certain, but I'm under the impression that it's the most we've ever had. In a Dublin based awards ceremony where the winners are mostly Dublin colleges (in fact, my colleague did some research and Trinity win a third of all awards each year - may have to revisit that this year taking DCU's success into account) I think it's absolutely fantastic for UL to have gotten such recognition this year. Hopefully it will just continue to get better and better! The only award I'm a bit sore about was website designer of the year. Kieran Caplice has done such an amazing job with anfocal.ie and ulfm.ie and I really think he deserves a lot of recognition for that. But then again, he has another three years of the smedias so I've no doubt the recognition he deserves is on his way to him

Wnolan - you are correct in saying there was a delay with your article being published. The online site is manned by two students and as they have college work and extra curricular work aswell, sometimes things fall between the cracks. Sorry about that!

Regarding C and S articles, I'm actually crying out for more articles to be submitted to the online site. We've gotten over 1.6 million hits since we went live at the end of January and it would be a shame if c and s peeps were to ignore the exposure they could get from the site! If you send me an article in an email, yes there will be a delay, but if you go directly to www.anfocal.ie, scroll to the bottom and click 'contribute an article' I'll get it up asap. I'm looking after the site on my own for the next two months, so everything should go up the day it's submitted.

OneMoreThing!

How many unique visitors did the website get Kelly? In my experience hits is not the most accurate statistic. I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trolling. Genuinely curious about this because 1.6 million is a massive number!

KellingtonDawg

No probs!

Unique visitors was in and around 14,000 if I remember correctly... myself and Colm F went through them last week but I never wrote them down. There are figures and stats for EVERYTHING which is why I can't recall exactly how many unique visitors - it's just that 1.6 million hits stuck in my head as it was the largest figure.

Come Monday I can publish some of the more interesting stats for it if people are interested?

Jester252

If you have the time. I love stats.

freyners

KellingtonDawg wrote: »

No probs!

Unique visitors was in and around 14,000 if I remember correctly... myself and Colm F went through them last week but I never wrote them down. There are figures and stats for EVERYTHING which is why I can't recall exactly how many unique visitors - it's just that 1.6 million hits stuck in my head as it was the largest figure.

Come Monday I can publish some of the more interesting stats for it if people are interested?

14,000 would be a real achievement, well done

highlydebased

OneMoreThing! wrote: »

How many unique visitors did the website get Kelly? In my experience hits is not the most accurate statistic. I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trolling. Genuinely curious about this because 1.6 million is a massive number!

KellingtonDawg wrote: »

No probs!

Unique visitors was in and around 14,000 if I remember correctly... myself and Colm F went through them last week but I never wrote them down. There are figures and stats for EVERYTHING which is why I can't recall exactly how many unique visitors - it's just that 1.6 million hits stuck in my head as it was the largest figure.

Come Monday I can publish some of the more interesting stats for it if people are interested?

Jester252 wrote: »

If you have the time. I love stats.

Have just had a look now, 20,532 unique visitors since Jan, 1.657m hits. This month has been the busiest so far

wnolan1992

KellingtonDawg wrote: »

Wnolan - you are correct in saying there was a delay with your article being published. The online site is manned by two students and as they have college work and extra curricular work aswell, sometimes things fall between the cracks. Sorry about that!

No worries, I wasn't complaining in so much as I was just saying that it wasn't always instantaneous publication on the site. (Not as if the article I wrote was earth shattering news or anything :pac: :pac: )


And fair play on those hit figures, some achievement in fairness.

Carol.Lillie

wnolan1992 wrote: »

No worries, I wasn't complaining in so much as I was just saying that it wasn't always instantaneous publication on the site. (Not as if the article I wrote was earth shattering news or anything :pac: :pac: )


And fair play on those hit figures, some achievement in fairness.

Do you know anything about websites, media and unique hits? How does an focal figures compare to the su website's figures? to the newspaper websites that won the smedias?

14k or 20k in the absence of context is a useless statistic and it just looks like you're trying to clutch at straws to give kellington a pat on her back.

I think it's grossly disingenuous for kellington to imply the awards were fixed or biased towards 'the dublin colleges'. A quick perusal through them reveals they are all high quality. I can't judge the journalistic contents right now but certainly seem good value for money.

Just seems like sour grapes to me, which is fine.

highlydebased

Carol.Lillie wrote: »

Do you know anything about websites, media and unique hits? How does an focal figures compare to the su website's figures? to the newspaper websites that won the smedias?

14k or 20k in the absence of context is a useless statistic and it just looks like you're trying to clutch at straws to give kellington a pat on her back.

I think it's grossly disingenuous for kellington to imply the awards were fixed or biased towards 'the dublin colleges'. A quick perusal through them reveals they are all high quality. I can't judge the journalistic contents right now but certainly seem good value for money.

Just seems like sour grapes to me, which is fine.

anfocal.ie has about 1/3 more visitors than ulsu.ie.

Cossax

highlydebased wrote: »

Have just had a look now, 20,532 unique visitors since Jan, 1.657m hits. This month has been the busiest so far

~20k unique visitors vs. 1.6m hits? Maybe I'm not all that up on website usage stats but that looks hugely odd. Spiders?

wnolan1992

highlydebased wrote: »

Have just had a look now, 20,532 unique visitors since Jan, 1.657m hits. This month has been the busiest so far

Are the unique visitors based on IP address? (curious since all UL computers would show up as the same IP)

needacchelp

There's actually a lot to take into account

Hits aren't the same as pageviews. Each 'hit' is an individual http request to the server. The browser issues one http request per resource . Each html file, javascript file, image, stylesheet etc is a separate resource. Loading one article from anfocal.ie actually seems to generate over 90 requests, although the majority of these seem to be to things like disqus comments, google analytics etc, so they're requests to separate domains and wouldn't be counted in Kelly's stats. About 40 seem to be requests to anfocal.ie and would be counted, it would vary for different pages though, i think it's less for the homepage

Of course, at the same time, you have to wonder whether the fact that many people are accessing anfocal.ie from college computers would give lower figures than in reality when it comes to the unique visitors.
UL only has a certain number of external IP addresses but then again maybe that doesn't mean the server wouldn't be able to distinguish between requests coming from different computers, I'm not sure.

Also, have the unique figures been taken from a stat like 'uniques this year'? Or have they been added up from figures for the uniques each month? Cause there's a big difference there...

I suppose spiders might have an impact too, as Cossax suggested, but I've seen web analytics that showed the number of hits from spiders of various search engines, so if they're distinguishable from normal hits then those stats could possibly be kept completely separate.

I don't mean to be mean here, it's just that hits being interpreted as pageviews is something that always annoys me.
Also, I think Carol Lillie is wrong above where she says we need context. This is the first semester anfocal.ie has been up and running and if it actually has gotten 20,000 unique visitors or more then that's a big achievement regardless of how the papers in Dublin perform.

DeclansKidney

Fishooks12 wrote: »

The majority of it is not journalism, in fact the sports section is embarrassing, nothing about actual college sport and mostly self-satisfying articles on The Premiership. the design is fairly pedestrian too

Fishooks12,
The sport this year was an embarrassment to An Focal. Fair enough for them to cover Premiership stuff, rugby (we're in a massive rugby area), even American Football as there is an increasing level of interest in the sport.

The two areas that really annoyed me was the lack of UL sport and coverage of baseball.

1. An focal is a college paper and should be focusing on the achievements of UL students, and the sports section be focusing on UL athletes. UL vikings and the ladies soccer team have been miles ahead of the rest of the country since I've been in college but it's nigh on impossible to keep up with them.

2. Baseball? Baseball? Come on like? I can understand that people may be interested in the sport. Don't get me wrong. But is there enough of an audience in an Irish university interested in baseball.
This is especially striking compared to the coverage given to college sports (as raised in my 1st point)

DeclansKidney

Oh I'll make a third point....


Somebody get Tomas McCarthy back for a masters or something so he can take over running the Sports section.

BRING BACK MOSSY!

DeclansKidney

Also, I think An Focal should go back to the tabloid style layout, rather than the current broadsheet incarnation. The paper was perfect for students to read on the go. It's just awkward now.

shabouwcaw

tabloid style layout

It's Berliner format? It's only marginally bigger than tabloid.

DeclansKidney

shabouwcaw wrote: »

It's Berliner format? It's only marginally bigger than tabloid.

It's not the size I mean, it's the ease of access. It's very difficult to read and focal in it's current style whilst walking for example.

MajesticDonkey

needacchelp wrote: »

Also, have the unique figures been taken from a stat like 'uniques this year'? Or have they been added up from figures for the uniques each month? Cause there's a big difference there...

For some reason the host has disabled viewing of stats by year, only on a monthly basis.

Robots only add up to just over 34,000 hits in total out of the ~1.7 million.

Anyhow, here are the stats for this year so far.