Progressive publishing at KUAM.com

Several of you have asked me for more insight into KUAM.com's web operations and analytics since I wrote a couple of recent items on the topic having to do with traffic, syndication, publishing volume and growth and viewership. An interesting thing to consider and something I discuss during tech talks is how our publishing has gotten greater and greater in volume over time.

The chart (full size image available here) plots the time its taken us to publish stories in blocks of 1,000 since I started in 2000 and we began doing news online. It shows how in Year 1 (when we ran FrontPage on a 14" monitor and a 33.6Kbps dial-up Internet connection), it took us about that long to run our first 1,000 stories online. Most recently, we set an internal record by pulling off 4-digit publishing in 69 days, and we're on pace this month to do that number in just under two months. Over the last year, we've averaged 88 days per each 1,000-article block.

There are several notable milestones within this timeline, such as when we migrated from a static system where we were saving physical files to disk to a dynamic, database-driven templated architecture based on ASP 3.0. We also implemented a custom content management system, built in-house, that publishes stories more rapidly, pulling them straight out of our Win32 newsroom backend. This lets us get stuff online fast, mirrored across web/SMS/WAP/RSS platforms, all in one operation, instead of the sequential authoring so common to blogs. (Before you ask, yes - we used this approach before and it drove me nuts to have to upload stories one at a time, with people reading them as you made them available. I got the idea from a BizTalk service I was using with MSNBC.com).

But of course, more than bragging about quantity, of chief concern to us is quality.