Passing on the baton

It’s all over. 4 years at York, and so much has changed in that 4 years, and so much will continue to change. As I was leaving the YSTV studio on Friday for the last time, after signing out my last ever key to the Nouse office, the workmen were putting up a sign in the Goodricke porters’ lodge: “Department of Mathematics. James College”. When Hes East is complete, the Uni will be unrecognisable to me if I ever come up and visit, my department won’t be next to the library any more, and Nouse might have moved into bigger offices in Langwith along with YUSU (here’s hoping). And yet, I will look back fondly on those things I remember which even people now don’t – living in Alcuin when it was a building site, the fountain between Vanbrugh and Physics, being able to quickly hop between Alcuin and Langwith without having to run down a massive hill and cross a road.

But I digress. I’m very nostalgic and sad about leaving, but I know I’ve got an awesome team to take my place. With the difficulties of holding by-elections over the summer, and with me technically no longer a student and no longer able to hold an officership in Nouse, Ali “Fantasy Football” Clark is Acting Technical Director until next term’s elections – and with the huge success of Fantasy Football and winning the technical achievement YUMA, Nouse.co.uk will surely continue to grow on to bigger and better things.

I’m not completely walking away just yet though – I have plenty of time this summer, and a few ideas I’d like to see in motion (including one suggested by a very drunk deputy politics editor in Ziggy’s back in autumn term) will come to fruition by next year.

Looking back over the year it’s staggering to see how far we’ve come: collaborating with other media societies, a redesigned website with a minisite for every major event, and according to Google Analytics an increase of 79% in visits to the site.

Now, this may be “journaljism”, blowing my own trumpet, but I’m pretty pleased with my achievements, but of course I couldn’t have done it by myself. Henry, for understanding the importance of the website and making sure it gets the right amount of emphasis, Jim, for putting up with my constant “This might be an interesting story” phone calls and e-mails, Mike Tomasello, Ali Clark and Alex Muller for turning up to and putting up with my 12 hour hackathons to get those new minisites up and running, Jenny O’Mahony for teaching my how the Nouse site worked when I took over, Tom Brearley for helping rebuild the Nouse network, and for everyone in the office who suffered when the part I tried to do without Tom’s help collapsed, Anna for being incredibly patient with all of those videos, and Matthew for those 2am discussions on the landing. And of course, Lida, Beth and Emily for editing all those pieces that people sent to go online, and to be there every Tuesday when everyone else was relaxing for producing the paper whilst we had our own copy, paste and resize image frenzy to get everything online for people to comment on. All of the writers, many of whom I never met, for actually getting the important stuff, content, and of course, all of our commenters. Some comments made me laugh (one of my favourite ones was left by someone who used the e-mail address “youknowwhothisis@northwood.com” in the comment field), some made me cry, but most were good and important discussion. I like to think that some of the issues brought up by our articles and the subsequent discussion actually led to real change.

Now that’s over, I can cover the thing I actually wanted to write about: Every term I sent out a “top 10” to the Nouse mailing list covering what the most read articles of the term are. Mainly because I find these kind of stats interesting, but I know some of you do too.

So here’s the top 10 of this entire year:

10. JSoc accuse University staff member of anti-Semitism – I personally was surprised that this was the only article where Nouse was accused of being irresponsible to appear in the top 10, but our first article in this countdown was a highly controversial article from February following accusations made by JSoc against a staff member causing an absolute flood of comments and 2700 views.

9. Friday’s coverage of Roses – the smallest day of Roses takes quite a low position in the top 10 with only 2730 views.

8. The sad news of Ron Weir passing away – it’s no surprise such a moving story as this appears so high, with both current students, staff and alumni adding their consolations to their article.

7. Police search student accommodation – one of the biggest news stories of the year, and it happened outside of term time too, meaning Nouse.co.uk was the only site to cover it, bringing us 2830 views.

6. York’s sex trade – probably slightly surprising to see a feature from 2007 this high, but further investigation reveals the reason. Nouse has a very strong Google presence (incoming links from national papers, other blogs, etc all make it), which actually makes this article second on Google for “sex in York”. What can we say, sex sells – 2910 views this year in fact.

5. Sunday at Roses – no surprise to see the second biggest day of Roses take number 5 with 2930 views.

4. The gender-neutral toilets UGM – covering a very controversial topic and an absolutely staggering number of comments, this is also the most commented piece on the entire website, 173 comments and 3180 views.

3. The liveblog of Roses Saturday – another unsurprising one here, the biggest day of Roses takes it place at number 3 with 3950 views.

2. The sports team’s interview with John Motson – largely helped by a huge amount of incoming links from major forums and the “blogosphere”, this tallied up nearly 4780 views.

1. YUSU elections live blog – I guess this is no real surprise, it’s the biggest single night of the year for campus media, but there it is – at over 9000 views.

And that’s it. Bye.