WEST CARLETON – May was another big month for West Carleton Online. We had 19,283 page-views in the month. A lot of our traffic was due to our flood coverage which we made freely accessible to all. In the subscriber-based journalism world providing our work for free isn’t a strong business idea, but it’s a habit we got in to after the Sept. 21, 2018 tornado, under the assumption that would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

We thank our subscribers for allowing us to provide that service to the greater West Carleton community. We know our valued advertisers appreciate the extra exposure. And we also know emergency coverage is too valuable a service to all of West Carleton to charge for it. Coverage of an emergency such as extreme flooding or a tornado really shows the strength of an online community journalism service. We started covering expected 2019 spring freshet conditions back in February. We provided professional prognostications from those who are paid to provide that service in February, March, April and May. We were the first to provide sandbag station locations and emergency planning information from the city. We were the only media outlet to provide direct links to emergency service agencies.

We have published more than 100 West Carleton focused stories related to this year’s flooding – many of them exclusive to West Carleton Online. We provided daily updates, sharing the stories of our community, on location and in nearly real time, with the world. We have covered the personal and the political stories. We have published the opinions on this year’s flooding from a variety of different perspectives. And we will continue to do so – yesterday (June 8) we spoke with the owner and staff of The Lighthouse Restaurant on their first day open in six weeks. Because of the quality and immediacy of our service, people made West Carleton Online a priority. Our Top 25 flood-related stories had more than 5,300 page-views in May.

We hope those who have not yet subscribed to West Carleton Online will now consider doing so. We hope if you are already a subscriber, you are enjoying the service and will recommend us to your neighbours (you are our Number One marketing tool). We encourage West Carleton residents to take direct ownership in their community journalism. Our subscribers know first-hand we listen to them – your stories are our stories. On to our Top 5 stories (as determined by number of page-views) in May.

Our Top 30 stories in May is dominated by flood stories and 5,306 of our page-views in our Top 30 stories were of that coverage. We are incredibly proud of our flood coverage in West Carleton – coverage we would put head-to-head with any other media outlet’s coverage on the issue, period.

So, we are going to exclude our flood coverage from our Top Five May stories because we feel we produced a lot of other amazing stories in West Carleton last month as well:

1. WC blood clinic in honour of a Warrior Hit Number 8 in May and was our top non-flood story in the month. It was the story of Constance Bay’s Lincoln Stoate, 7, whose life was turned around by the blood products he takes.

1. Light up Dunrobin on Canada Day was right behind at Number 9. It’s going to be a heck of a Canada Day party.

1. Two Constance Bay firefighters promoted was Number 16 on the list. While it was about a promotion, it also had a love story in it as well which we think helped push it up the list.

1. HCA has full board for 2019 didn’t break the top 20 landing at Number 21. While a volunteer organization filling all volunteer board positions is big news, the most interesting conversation that night was should a community association be politically active?

1. Presidents: Fair committed to community reached Number 25 meaning, 20 of our Top 25 stories in May were flood related. The agriculture and the homecraft president sat down with West Carleton Online to talk about how their organization moves forward from last fall’s tornado that landed on the Friday morning of the fair and forever changed a community.

The month was so busy, some West Carleton Online story favourites didn’t even crack the Top 25 including Canada’s best golfer Brooke Henderson visiting Dunrobin (Number 26); Carp’s McTavish a Pete (Number 29); Spring gets running start at 23rd Diefenbooker (Number 31); 40th trillium tour an art garden lovers’ must (Number 32); and Kanata scouts add 300 trees to Dunrobin.

During the month of May, we had more than 366 different pages visited. We hope you will consider subscribing to the first daily publishing, community-owned journalism service in West Carleton history.