The recent student deaths have generated intense interest, and the University’s remedial measures have dominated the pages of The Sun and its web site since. In my last column I wrote about the necessity of sensitivity and nuance in reporting on these events, but now I want to define more concretely how much attention this has attracted. This will give readers and Sun staffers alike a better view of the appropriate scope of The Sun’s coverage.

The Sun’s web editor, James Elkins ’11, gave me access to the Google Analytics report for cornellsun.com, which details page views, paths that visitors take, the average time visitors spend reading individual stories and many other informative web site metrics. How I looked at the page views and other relevant metrics is not overly scientific but is important anecdotally. I went back to the start of spring semester to get an idea of the trends in the web site’s traffic and its newsiest items.  

The entire month of January is not the best point of reference, considering the drop off in coverage during winter break. But once students returned, the unique page views for the entire site on any given day never reached 20,000, eclipsing 15,000 only once. Moving into February, those numbers held pretty steady during the week, dipping to only a few thousand on the weekends.  

The news broke Feb. 17 that rescue workers had recovered the body of a Cornell student from the Fall Creek gorge and had closed off the Thurston Avenue bridge. That day, The Sun’s site approximately tripled its prior weekday average for traffic. It tailed off during each of the next two days, but still remained higher than at any point in the semester before the story broke.  

That first story, which ran without a byline, was the most viewed in February by far. In its various iterations that appeared on the web, it garnered more views than the next 16 most popular stories combined, including the story about sex in the library stacks and the announcement of Drake as the headliner for Slope Day. And in the week after, page views settled at a higher level than before Feb. 17.

When two deaths occurred in one week, the traffic similarly increased. When Huffington Post linked to a follow-up piece on the campus reaction, The Sun’s servers were overwhelmed and crashed. Static pages were put up in their place to lessen the impact of the inbound traffic, which for one day was approximately six times the median from early this semester. Many nationwide readers undoubtedly left the site after reading the event coverage and never came back. But above-average traffic levels after the coverage suggest that visitors did come back for other content.  

I do not mean to denigrate the gravity of the situation with this admittedly rudimentary analysis. I also do not believe that web hits have an inherent correlation with an appropriate level of interest — nor do they somehow correlate with a need for better journalism. I do not argue that just because more people are reading, the product should be of a higher quality than it otherwise would. Sun staffers should undertake the same diligent journalistic practices whether a story gets 10 page views or 10 million.  

The popularity and increased attention that these types of stories attract should instead serve as a reminder of the need for quality reporting and appropriate sensitivity. People who have never been to The Sun’s site before were reading Sun pieces, and the coverage might be their first exposure to the Cornell community. While The Sun’s primary audience is always that community, Sun staffers should always be aware of the scope of certain pieces they publish and how widely or narrowly those pieces are received. While the quality of journalism should not change, the content can. Knowledge of its audience will empower The Sun to provide a more attuned and better product.

Rob Tricchinelli is a second-year student in the Law School and also holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He can be reached at public-editor@cornellsun.com. The public editor column typically appears alternate Mondays this semester.