Station Highlights
Dec 2, 2019, 3:53 PM | Updated: Jan 16, 2020, 11:08 am
Lights Out on Daylight Savings
A Utah State lawmaker wants the state to be able to decide whether to follow Daylight Saving Time. Rep. Rob Bishop joined the show live to explain why his bill to give states the choice hasn’t gone anywhere since it was filed earlier this year.
Syria Surprise
President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria dominated headlines for weeks–the story reaching a fever pitch when Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo announced a temporary ceasefire after meeting with the president of Turkey. At a moment’s notice Rep. Chris Stewart came on the show to give his immediate reaction, really hearing about it for the first time from Dave and Debbie.
Mexican Massacre
A Mexico town few of us knew existed buried the women and children killed in a massacre by the drug cartel, when residents made the decision to flee for the United States. A current Southern Utah resident who grew up in La Mora joined Dave and Debbie to react to her family’s mad scramble for the border–her impactful interview punctuated by her decision to ”never go back.”
Presidential Race
At the start of the show, we heard the news that former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was pulling out the 2020 Presidential race. By the end of the show we had Gov. Sanford on the phone to comment on his withdrawal from the race. Boyd asked Mark some hard questions, and we were able to capture an exclusive and breaking interview during a nationally developing story.
Syria Times Seven
All about the Syria conflict. We have had continuous coverage on this, but this particular instance had four different voices, seven different angles all interweaved together… and I feel it’s a prime example of how we take a complicated topic and break it down into the sum of its parts.
NBA Newsflash
Salt Lake City hosting the NBA All Star game in 2023, paired with the season opener made for big news. We had Jeff surprise interviewed Cleon and then Paul and Mary on angles all related to the game. Three minutes worth of sports coverage — super rare for a news show!
We had five videos with more than 25 thousand minutes viewed – and one of those had 900,000 minutes viewed and counting! Engagement on Facebook was up 48.4% from the month before, and a huge chunk of that is from the UHP train rescue video. We shared multiple videos from that event, including dashcam from the trooper and the train. All of those videos did fantastic for us. The original video (dashcam from the trooper) was shared more than 1,000 times.
We picked up about 1,500 new followers in October, putting us at 21,825. We went from averaging barely 5 – 10 posts per month on the account at the beginning of the year to about 50 now. And we set an all-time high for interactions (likes and comments) from our Instagram fans in October with 46,153. In spite of having far fewer followers than KSL TV, Fox 13 or even the Deseret News, CrowdTangle shows us consistently leading the market on Instagram.
Website
Kelli Pierce wrote a story about setting a record for low temps in the last week of the month. That story, all by itself, got almost as much traffic as just our homepage (64K pageviews to 65K for the homepage itself). It single-handedly drove up overall traffic to our site for the month, as people who landed there from Facebook clicked around and read other stories. You can see this demonstrated in the chart below – each dot represents traffic coming to our site from Facebook. The end-of-the-month spike is almost all traffic to Kelli’s story.
