Cincinnati.Com: High schools

In 2009, I led an initiative to redesign our high school sports page, spotlighting our top content and incorporating more social media. The new site highlighted our blog, creating a steady stream of news updates throughout the day -- despite the fact we had only two full-time staffers covering more than 100 high schools.
The page also featured a Twitter widget, and through the use of hashtags such as #cincyfb and #cincyhoops, our site aggregated our staff's tweets with user-generated content from throughout the region. 
Combining social media with our comprehensive stats package, photo galleries and traditional Enquirer and Community Press content doubled our traffic in the fall to nearly 1 million page views.
In the first 15 days of our page relaunch, we attained 176,582 views, including 45,624 on the first three game nights. 

Cincinnati.Com: Recruiting

Also in 2009, I devised and oversaw the creation of a theme page for high school recruiting. We identified high school football recruiting as a major topic of interest and built a page to house our content from the late summer through the football season and on to national signing day in February.
Again we featured social media, spotlighting our reporter's up-to-the minute tweets about commitments and campus visits. In the summer, we also featured "diaries" as told to us by three top area recruits. 
As we built our brand, the audience responded. On signing day, we attained more than 200,000 page views and drew several thousand hits on our chat with new UC football coach Butch Jones.

Other digital highlights

Mobile alerts: My team has implemented mobile text alerts for high school football scores. We took this subscriber-based initiative from zero to as many as 2,483 alerts in 2008. In 2009, we reached 7,761 alerts. 

Social media: I created the Sports department's first Twitter account, @BracketBuster, in 2009. Our Twitter presence quickly grew to include @MissEnquirer and @EnqRunner. 
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