Fiddlehead Focus, still breaking records after all this time

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Dear readers,

Last year, Fiddlehead Focus saw unprecedented growth across the board in both our print and our online editions, and every now and again when we look back on where we started and where we find ourselves now, it's a little hard to believe - and we have you to thank for it. 

Putting together a paper and maintaining a website that contains quality information to keep readers returning is a challenge (and that's a severe understatement). What our readers are unable to see is the behind-the-scenes stuff that happens, like when our reporters are called out of bed to report on a fire or an accident so that you, the reader, can have the most current information available. People have joked that we sometimes arrive on the scene before the rescue crews - which isn't entirely true, but we do often arrive shortly thereafter. We work holidays and weekends, often putting in a seven-day work week for months on end. It's this dedication that keeps our readers returning to our website over and over. We truly attempt, every day, to live up to our slogan, "Where the Valley finds out about the Valley." It's important to note that only about half of our website readers physically live in the St. John Valley. The rest live elsewhere in Aroostook County, southern Maine, and the rest of the country. We even have a dedicated group of people in Canada and overseas who regularly visit. 

The growth we've seen as the community has embraced us is amazing, and it's nice to see our hard work appreciated.

In the last month of 2011, we printed 800 papers each week. A year later, not only have we changed our format to a newsprint paper, which is much closer to traditional newspapers people are used to seeing, but we have increased our print circulation to 3,000 papers - a 275 percent increase.

In December 2012, we were excited to see the number of unique visitors to the website top 11,000 in a month and the number of pages those visitors viewed on our website reach 428,000. As we closed out the numbers for the first month of 2013, we saw a 145 percent increase in unique visitors - 27,472 in the month of January, and an impressive 367 percent increase in the number of pages on the Fiddlehead Focus website that those unique visitors viewed - or 2,043,700 page views in January 2013.

Our web popularity has prompted us to upgrade our server capacity four separate times in 2012 to handle the increase in traffic. 

Our social media presence has also increased, with just over 300 'likes' on our Facebook page in December 2012 and 3,342 today. That's a 1,000 percent increase. Wow! We still have dozens of new page 'likes' each month. 

We met many other milestones in the past year as well, like having our peers recognize us as professionals in the field with our acceptance to the Maine Press Association. We joined local Chambers of Commerce, attended trade shows and parades, grew our staff from one to six employees, and so much more. It really makes us stop to wonder what this next year has in store for our business. 

Well, we're eager to find out and we thank you for growing with us. The enthusiasm we've seen from the community is inspiring and it encourages us to keep going, even when we have days that we're feeling a bit burnt out. Thank you for visiting, and thank you even more for coming back over and over. We're proud to serve you.