The James Logan Courier

Courier Staff Report

At the dawn of the last day of its biggest month ever, The Courier received its 100,000th visitor since its relaunch 20 months ago as what may be the world's only daily, 365-day-per-year, student-produced high school news source and set new daily readership records for itself.

The Courier's visitor counter at the bottom of its main page clicked over to 100,000 at around 5:30 a.m. this morning, said Patrick Hannigan, staff advisor to The Courier. The counter started at zero on March 5, 2006.

Daily readership reached a new peak in November, when an average of about 1,200 people a day, and as many as about 1,700 on one day, visited The Courier's website. "Both of those numbers are new records for The Courier," said Hannigan.

"It's been a big month for us," he said. "We started the month winning the 2007 Weblog Award for Best Education Blog, beating some very solid competition from professionally-run websites, and things have just gone up from there."

Anne Chen, who has been Editor-in-Chief of The Courier for most of time since it went to it's new format, said "It's really great to know that The Courier has such a large group of supporters behind it. I'm proud of the fact that our hard work does not go to waste and that Logan students actually care enough about their school to get involved and know what's going on. I'm confident that our readership will continue to rise in the coming years."

Hannigan said that The Courier probably has actually had many more visitors than 100,000. "Statistics for website traffic are pretty iffy," he said. "The counter at the bottom of our page says that we've had 100,000 visitors, but according to our more comprehensive site traffic analysis software, Webalizer, we've had about a quarter million visitors. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

According to Webalizer, The Courier had 36,545 visitors in November alone, and averaged
1,218 visits per day for the month. November 20 was The Courier's best day in terms of visitors ever, with 1,735, according to Webalizer.

"These numbers are really good, for us and our advertizers," said Hannigan, "But we've still got a lot of potential for growth," Hannigan said. "With 4,000 students at Logan, it's not hard to imagine the possibility of having them all visit daily, plus their parents and guardians. We also hope to lure more readers who are not connected to Logan and add them to our worldwide audience."

According to visit logs, readers in more than 150 countries have visited The Courier.

"We also hope to continually improve the product we offer, with better writing, more comprehensive coverage of the school, and other interesting things," Hannigan said. "There's just as much room for improvement there as in audience growth."

"Our goal is to be the best publication of any type in the entire universe," Hannigan said. "We've got a long way to go."