Something new we are starting on DrydenWire.com, SawyerWire.com, and BurnettWire.com, is celebrating life events for those that contribute to our news outlets.
Today, we are celebrating the birthday of our featured writer on DrydenWire.com, Diane Dryden.
Up until a couple of months ago, DrydenWire consisted of just two people: myself and Diane - my mother. Since then, we now have 2 News Directors and a Marketing Director, as well as several others that contribute to our websites.
Diane has been with DrydenWire.com since it's conception in the spring of 2015 and has been our featured writer since we first went "Live" later that same year.
I am reminded of how far we have come as a media outlet.
For those 100-200 people that read our content on our website "way back" in the fall of 2015, you might remember that Diane's featured story was published every Monday and stayed our featured story for the entire week. We were new at this and we looked at it like a newspaper (one featured or "above-the-fold" story every week). We then filled in the gaps daily of all of the other stories so that by Sunday, we would essentially have a "full" paper.
We were lucky to have 100 people on our site every day and when we did, we celebrated together.
Within one month we quickly realized that we were going about it all wrong, and Diane started to publish two featured stories per-week - one on Monday and one on Friday that would run until the following Monday.
We "improved" to about 200 people on our site every day and when we did, we celebrated together.
Within two months of that, we - as a committee of two - came to the unanimous conclusion that we needed to be the "un-paper" and just do what we wanted to do; this included our decision to start running a featured story every day with 5-7 additional posts each day as well. I remember both Mom and I thinking there was no way we could do this every day.
2 years later, Diane has written over 300 stories for DrydenWire.com. Her stories continue to be the most-read stories on our website every week. To that end, in just our 2nd full year (2017), we had over 4.2 million pageviews on our site making us by far the most read online news outlet in our area.
But the thing is, Diane contributes more to DrydenWire than just human interest, business, and news stories; she has been my moral compass and sounding board on a daily basis.
Happy Birthday, Diane. We would quite literally not be where we are today without you.
I love you, Mom. I would quite literally not be where I am today without you.
Last Update: Jan 19, 2018 12:45 pm CST
