Ryan Thornburg pointed out a story in the N.C. Press Association’s September newsletter about The Pilot, where I had a wonderful time interning last summer. By posting more frequently, they’ve increased their online readership by 14 percent in six weeks.

I just went to their Web site for the first time in probably six weeks, and I’m really excited by what I see: It’s a Tuesday (they publish Sunday, Wednesday and Friday), but there are five new stories on the Web not in the print.

When I was there last summer, there were definitely occasions when we published on the Web before print. I covered one meeting in Pinehurst, and we went Web first with it because The Fayetteville Observer reporter was there, and we didn’t want our readers to have to wait an extra day for the story because we knew in the time between, they’d just skip us. I wrote another, more in-depth story for the print edition.

Publisher David Woronoff said that he realized waiting to break news in paper to avoid tipping off competitors was “stupid.” That was something I emphasized this summer at my internship at The Salisbury Post, and something community journalism guru Jock Lauterer grilled in my head: Your newspaper’s Web site is not a different entity/brand/whatever than your print. You’re not scooping yourself by publishing online.

It sounds like The Pilot’s already done a lot to increase online readership, but I thought of a few other things they could do to make the Web site more user-friendly:

• Make the video and multimedia more prominent on the homepage – the blogs and multimedia are listed way down the page.
• On articles, provide dates for when they were published.
• The navigation bars on the left and then lower down the page on the right are bulky and confusing.
• Link to reporter’s e-mail addresses in the end taglines.
• Add a widget so that readers can share stories. Now you can e-mail it, print it, or e-mail an editor, but what about del.ici.ous? digg? etc.
• For stories that also have multimedia, link back and forth between the article and the media. The Pilot did this slideshow of photos to go with this story about a fire at the mill John Edwards worked at back in the day. But you have to search the archives to find the story, and it doesn’t link to the slideshow anywhere, and the slideshow doesn’t link to the article.
• Show related stories. It looks like they’re doing this for the latest stories for the most part, but this later story about the investigation into the fire doesn’t mention the previous articles. This story about a town facing trouble after digging up illegally buried homes does have links to related stories.
• Allow comments on stories. Make folks register, create a comments policy and enforce it, but let the space become a forum. 
• When new articles are published in between print editions, stick a time stamp on them so that people who have been going to the site will be reminded that this is new information.
• The photo gallery has hundreds of photos from community events all over. Give the readers the option to buy copies of the photos. And while you’re at it, give readers a chance to submit their own photos.