One year on line for Lutheran magazine

The goal of providing timely, relevant news and information from a Lutheran perspective reached a milestone October 1 as www.canadianlutheran.ca celebrated its first anniversary. Launched as an online version of Lutheran Church–Canada’s award-winning print magazine The Canadian Lutheran, the site includes news stories, features as well as film reviews, cultural commentary and theological insight articles.

“We’ve seen more than 21, 500 people visit the site in the past year,” reports Dr. Ian Adnams, LCC’s director of communications. “And we know more than half come back multiple times because the site logged more than 78,800 page views.”

The news story most viewed over the past year was Many Lutherans still support traditional marriage, posted in July following the decisions by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada regarding same-sex issues. “With stories like this we find other sites establishing links to our stories or republishing them entirely,” Adnams explained. The next most popular post was an article about the movie The King’s Speech and its relationship to preaching.

Stories and articles written for www.canadianlutheran.ca often appear in the printed version of The Canadian Lutheran and vice-versa. However, since the online site has no restriction on size, readers will always find more content online.

Statistical information generated from the site shows a spike in readership every two weeks when LCC publishes InfoDigest. “Ideally, we’d like to see people checking the site two or three times a week rather than every two weeks,” said Dr. Adnams. Readers arrive at the site by clicking stories on LCC’s website http://www.lutheranchurchcanada.ca/ or through links published on Facebook. Adnams say the online magazine has “a healthy number of ‘fans’ on Facebook who share stories with other Facebook friends in their network.” He also hopes congregations will spread the word about the site through bulletin announcements and word of mouth.

Over the past year www.canadianlutheran.ca has made changes to the site as LCC Communications constantly monitors readership and response. You are invited to use the “comments” section of this story to provide any feedback or suggestions.

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