On a typical day, Boreal averages approximately 2,500 users per day on it’s boreal.org website. After Boreal posted its first story about the April 13 outbreak of the fire in downtown Grand Marais, traffic to the site exploded averaging more than 12,000 people each hour immediately following its first news report and totaling more than 78,000 users at the day’s end. User interest continued into Tuesday with the two-day traffic total to the site accounting for more than 100,000 unique visitors.
“Obviously interest in this story extended far beyond Cook County. Driven by social media posts of the Boreal article, this is by far the largest two-day totals for user traffic in Boreal’s history,” said Executive Director Lisa Bauer, Boreal Community Media, “Our original article on the fire was posted on the Boreal Facebook page and was shared over 1,700 times.”
“Grand Marais has a special place in the hearts of so many people whether they visit the North Shore frequently or have a fond memory from the past”, said Boreal Board Member Eric Block, “We had hundreds of visitors to our site from the Twin Cities and virtually every city in greater Minnesota. The people who visited the site to read about the fire live in places such as Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and as far away as London, England. I am sure all these people feel the same emotional loss from this tragic fire as we do in Cook County and wanted to learn everything they could.”
Leave a Reply