Greater Harrisburg's Community Magazine

News & Brews: Sure, Harrisburg is just emerging from an historic financial catastrophe, but, hey, where’s the beer?

Screenshot 2014-03-30 10.57.31A lot of reporters go into journalism because (believe it or not) they love government. Or, at least, they think it’s important, which, in fact, it is.

Public policy affects our lives in so many ways, and most college journalism majors can’t wait to get out there to cover their first City Council meeting or mayoral press conference or legislative hearing  (even if they later end up working for a trade magazine or in communications or as someone’s shill, which, these days, is more likely than not).

I was like that, too. As a kid, I was a voracious reader and, following graduate school, spent several years in the trenches of local newspapers before becoming a freelance technology writer. I later circled back to real journalism when I co-founded TheBurg.

I found it refreshing to cover stories again that actually mattered to people—taxes, schools, sanitation. That said: I quickly realized that covering Harrisburg was the journalism equivalent of a middle-aged man deciding to take up skiing again with a first run down the perilous “Harikiri” slope in Austria.

I spent endless hours, so many late nights, covering fights over budgets; fights over the financial crisis; fights over bankruptcy; fights over the Harrisburg Authority. In my mind, it was important that our readers had our perspective of some of the most significant events in the history of this city.

Silly me. You want to know what really interests our readers? Beer. Hey, at least, it’s good beer!

Last year, we re-designed and upgraded TheBurg’s website, which, among other things, allowed us to track which stories were the most popular online. Since then, the most-read and most-shared story, by far, has been a news article that I wrote in January about Alter Ego Brewing Co. planning to build a brewhouse in Midtown Harrisburg.

It wasn’t even close.

As of this writing, that story had more than 3,400 views and nearly 1,500 Facebook shares. In second place: a photo feature on the renovation of the Moffitt Mansion for WebpageFX (the company moved into Harrisburg and into the building last month), followed by stories on our November cover, a Whitaker Center exhibit, the Mary K properties and the purchase of the First Church of God by Gamut Theatre Group.

Now, at TheBurg, we do journalism the old-fashioned way. We don’t measure our success by clicks or by the apparent online popularity of content. In other words, we’re not in it for the eyeballs.

Therefore, I don’t really care which story ranks first in page views. It’s not going to change our news judgment, nor make any difference to our bottom line. Besides, most readers still cherish our print product above all, and, indeed, we believe it’s vital for us to have a strong physical presence in the community we serve.

Nonetheless, as a close follower of all things Harrisburg, I find the relative popularity of our stories fascinating, even if forced to use the deeply flawed measure of page views and Facebook shares.

So, Harrisburg, you care a lot about beer, culture and development issues. You also like to read about dogs, restaurants and small business. Interestingly, the two bread-and-butter issues of local reporting—politics and government—rank lower in the order.

I guess that doesn’t surprise me. As I’ve said time and again, TheBurg tries to reflect the totality of life here. We often report and comment on government matters, but also know that, unlike most young journalists, politics and policy aren’t everyone’s obsessions.

In the end, I do find one common thread among our most-read online content. These stories tend to be hyper-local—both news and features—that have a big impact on our small community and that are hard (if not impossible) to find elsewhere. And we definitely plan to bring you more of those.

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