At UKrant: A year after the first lockdown
At UKrant: A year after the first lockdown
Door Rob Siebelink
By Rob Siebelink
Every day, the editorial staff at UKrant wonders: What are we writing about, why are we writing about it, and how are we writing about it? A look behind the scenes.
The UG buildings are empty. Zernike is a ghost town. The UB is closed. The pubs inaccessible. Gone is the hustle and bustle of the city. It’s been almost a year since the UG closed its doors during the first lockdown.
Like most people, I look back at the past twelve months with a distinct lack of fondness. But I’m also proud. Proud of what the UKrant editors have been doing.
As I wrote in this column at the start of this pandemic, not knowing just how long it would last, the need for information is especially great in times of crisis. You need to be able to count on your editors. I could. And I still can.
Last week, I got a heart-warming message from a student: ‘We don’t get to go to the university anymore’, she wrote, ‘but we still want to know what’s going on. UKrant keeps me and many of my fellow students informed. UKrant makes sure we stay involved.’
Normally, I write this column to apologise for something we did wrong. But it’s nice to write about something we did right for once.
If you want to know what’s going on regarding the coronavirus in Washington, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, or Beijing, you can turn to the national media. But UKrant is the only outlet to report on what’s happening with the pandemic at the UG. Since mid-March 2020, our editors have written hundreds of news stories and background articles about corona and the university.
Stories about online classes and online exams. Proctoring software. Fraud. About loneliness. Illegal parties. Zoom versus Collaborate. The bachelor-before-master rule. The BSA. About first-year students who’ve never seen the Academy building in real life and have only met their fellow students over Collaborate. About online dating. Speed-testing. Relief campaigns.
In 2020, our readership shot up. Every single record we ever set over the past few years was shattered.
In 2020, we had 2.3 million page views, and 770,000 individual visitors That’s 30 percent more than we had in 2019, 60 percent more than in 2018, and 130 percent more than 2017.
As evidenced by the hits we got on our translated articles, many Groningen internationals turned to UKrant last year, but we were also read abroad, Google Analytics tells us. Not entirely surprisingly, we’re most read in Germany; we had 42,000 page views there. The rest is a little random: 20,000 page views from Belgium, 26,000 from the US, 6,000 from Italy, and two from Greenland.
Google Analytics shows a handful of countries where no one visited our website. One of them is North Korea.
I guess you can’t have everything.
Rob Siebelink is editor-in-chief at UKrant