Feb. 6, 2009

Wrestling with mouse clicks

A dozen kids on a wrestling mat going crazy sounds like pure gold for our internet site. Who wouldn’t want to spend hours clicking from picture to picture on our great photo gallery of wild little critters jumping all over each other doing cute kid things?

Just about everyone.

Though the story and photos of the children’s after school wrestling program in our sports section this week were exceptional, very few people checked out the photo gallery on the web. That’s too bad, and it had us scratching our heads. Cute kids are the meat and potatoes of your typical community newspaper.

What did go off the charts on the web was a photo gallery and video of Southern Oregon University junior Flamur Vehapi, who writes poetry about his experience in Kosovo. That was very popular.

Who knew?

Sure, it was topical, poetic, thought-provoking. Even inspiring. But more popular than wrestling kids?

I’m thinking maybe the meat and potatoes for the Ashland Daily Tidings is sometimes more along the lines of braised tofu and organic asparagus spears. Or maybe you can think of a better food analogy?