Free Press Editor Paul Anger doesn't know how to spell his columnist's name

The congratulatory memo below was beamed out from Free Press Editor Paul Anger to the staff yesterday. He was quite happy about the traffic that resulted from Bill Laitner's moving story about James Robertson, the Detroit man who walks some 21 miles round trip each day to get to his job. The story went viral and the Free Press enjoyed insane internet numbers and Anger wanted to let everyone know how proud he was.

Anger also shouted out some other reporters who did fine work this week that helped produce over 4.5 million pageviews on Monday. Specifically he wanted to call attention to one John Carlyle. (Sorry, Detroitblogger John. We still love you though.)

Subject: Great Journalism and Traffic

If we ever needed a reminder that great readership comes from great journalism, we got it this week.

Of course, I’m referring to the explosion of video views and social media and other media picking up Bill Laitner’s incredible story about incredible walking man James Robertson. Bill and Ryan Garza put together a package that just went … nuts. Folks, we hit an all-time record 4.77 million page views on Monday, and the traffic on Sunday set records for a weekend day.

And Sunday’s traffic was not all due to Bill and Ryan – Paul Egan’s watchdog piece on millions wasted on railroad cars and John Carlyle’s coywolves mystery also went pretty crazy.

We were smart about promoting our content through social media and all our platforms — that’s part of what we do now. We are now able to reach more people and make more connections than ever before. But here’s the thing:

It all starts with great content. It always does.

– Paul