By Pepper Parr
BURLINGTON, ON September 19, 2011 We will soon have a year of operation under our belts – time to bring you up to date on who reads us, how often they read us and what we are adding to the menu.
We went live last October, the 19th to be exact and in the last six months have published more than 350 stories. More than half a million pages (504,278 to be exact) have been read by the more than 27,000 people who have come to the web site. Those 27,000 people visited the web site more than 68,500 times in the last six months. The average reader looks at between 3.5 and 7.5 pages.
When the city did it’s semi-annual survey of how satisfied people were with the quality of service the city delivers they were asked where they got their information – 28% of the people who answered the survey listed Our Burlington as one of their sources of information and 25% said they get some of their information from Cogeco Cable. Just 33% said they get their information from City Talk, the newspaper the city publishes and distributes to every residence within the city.
Our Burlington was less than six months old when this survey was done. The numbers speak for themselves. One of the major advantages of an electronic media – or a newspaper on a web site – is that you can go in and search everything we have ever written. Everything stays on the web site. Ouch!, some might say.
Experience in the political trenches and a life-long Burlington resident Casey Cosgrove will bring a viewpoint with a bit of an edge. His focus will be on community and leadership – especially making leadership accountable to the community.
Two new regular contributors are joining our ranks this month. Casey Cosgrove is going to write regularly on community and the leadership communities need to prosper. His column will be Casey on Community. Casey, who was a candidate for Ward 5 during the 2006 election and came in second – losing to current Mayor Rick Goldring by less than 500 votes. Many are convinced that has Casey had another week of campaigning he could have beaten Goldring – who would then not have been the Ward Councillor nor gone on to defeat Cam Jackson in the 2010 election. There are those who are grateful Casey lost.
Besides writing for Our Burlington, Casey is an avid hockey coach and is in the arena with sons Jack and Evan almost every day and on the road with them close to every second weekend. He is currently on leave from his job as Director of the Canadian Centre for Financial Literacy (CCFL). He teaches leadership at the University of Guelph. He is married to Bryna who also teaches business at both Seneca and Sheridan College. The family includes daughter Kate. All were seen in the Terry Fox run last Sunday.
The CCFL was created to build and develop financial literacy among low-income Canadians. It works with governments, businesses and communities to help people save and invest wisely. Launched in 2008, the Canadian Centre for Financial Literacy (CCFL) is a division of the national, charitable organization SEDI. The CCFL is the first of its kind in the country. It is the only Canadian centre that delivers easy-to-use money management training to low-income groups. It works through partnerships with community-based social agencies in an effort to effect positive change.
The goal is to educate Canadians to make informed decisions about their money and the financial resources available to them. To achieve this goal, the CCFL aims to combine efforts with governments, businesses and community organizations. Casey, who is frequently quoted in the national news media has been involved in improving the financial literacy of low income families for more than 15 years. He is currently on leave from CCFL.
Everything in the Cosgrove household is family focused. We don’t think Bryna play goalie (yet?) but everyone works for the team. The whole family of five took part in the Terry Fox run last Sunday.
Social and Enterprise Development Innovations (SEDI), the parent organization, is a Canadian national charity which has been at the forefront of initiatives that enable people to save and invest wisely and participate in the economic mainstream. The organization’s work focuses on three areas: financial literacy, asset building and entrepreneurship. Since its founding in 1986, SEDI has helped shape significant social policies in Canada by conducting market and policy research and by acting as a knowledge broker between communities and governments.
Later in the week we will be introducing a well-known, nationally we might add, blogger who has a strong Conservative and conservative streak to him. He can be positively acidic with some of his comments. Russ Campbell will be more fully introduced later in the week.
We had an unfortunate hiccup with our service last February but we recovered and settled the differences that brought about the disruption of service.
Since then we made significant revision to the look and feel of the web site and will introduce many more in the weeks ahead.. We originally allowed for immediate comment and feedback but had to disable that feature because we were getting literally thousands of comments most of which were nonsense spam. We have figured out how to eliminate the spam and the ability to comment will be back in place by the end of the week. We look forward to whatever you have to say. We will be tweeting anyone who wants our 140 characters of comment.
For a period of time someone at City Hall put a block in place and people at Brant Street weren’t able to read us. That got lifted – we still don’t know exactly who put the block in place but it has been lifted. At some point we will get to the bottom of that.
Since our arrival the number of media covering city hall committees has increased – on occasion there are four media people at council meetings. We were the only media organization that covered all nine sessions of the Strategic Planning meeting. We are about to publish several articles on that exercise. Your city council and city hall staff learned a lot about themselves and the city they work for during the Strategic Planning Sessions. One of our early stories on the Strategic Plan is at this link..
We are not giving Education or Sports the attention they deserve nor are we adequately covering entertainment and culture effectively. Now that we know the business model we have is sustainable we can invest more into the organization and begin adding full time staff.
We think we have reduced the information deficit just a little and hope that we have entertained as well.
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