Glenn Turner is the special projects editor at the Morning Sentinel and
Kennebec Journal. He's also sort of the "MacGyver" of our Web sites. If we
really want to do something in News but don't know how, Glenn often can
find a way.

He recently did a report for us on the number of visits to the home pages
for both of our Web sites, onlinesentinel.com and kjonline.com. The numbers
are heartening and seem to suggest we are doing things mostly right, led by
-- my opinion -- the breaking-news updates that we do throughout each day.
We started doing updates in February.

Here's what Glenn showed at onlinesentinel.com: Total visits to the Web
site increased 22 percent from January through June 2007, from 124,036
views in January to 150,963 in June.

Here's what he found at kjonline.com: Total monthly views to that site have
increased 60 percent during this six-month period, from 118,071 in January
to 189,096 in June. The May numbers at the KJ site were higher than June
because one particular story in May was linked by several "news of the
weird" type Web sites out there.

These numbers prove what I've been writing in my newspaper column off and
on: Yes, daily print circulation at the KJ and Sentinel is flat or slightly
decreasing. But local, urgent community journalism is alive, doing well and
will stick around for quite some time.

Combining these Web numbers with our respectable newspaper circulation
numbers, our journalism is being read by more people more often. Our
"reach" is growing and our newspapers already have one of the highest
"reach" numbers -- more than 80 percent of the people in our markets see
our newspapers over a seven-day period -- in the United States.

Eric Conrad
Executive Editor
Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel
Telephone: 207-621-5630