Lewis County Sirens.com

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

I realize 2010 has been over for a couple of days, but I’m going to take a look back briefly and tell you about the top stories of last year here on Lewis County Sirens.

Well since I started in June anyhow.

I can’t say for sure exactly what the most read news stories were, because if they are ranked somewhere in my web sites statistics, I haven’t found that part.

But I can see the numbers for when people Google (or use other search engines) looking for something, and then come to Lewis County Sirens to read about it.

It’s sort of a toss up between the August fatal shootings that left 16-year-old David West Jr., his father and his father’s friend dead and the summer time saga of the missing 16-year-old Austin King of Morton who eventually was found dead.

More people were looking for news about “Austin King Morton” and “Jack Arnold Silverthorne” – the young man charged in his homicide – and related search terms than for stories about the Salkum-Onalaska area triple homicide. That is, if you leave out searches for Robbie Russell and variations on his name.

I say it’s a toss up because who knows if people wanted to read about Russell a so-called person of interest in the slayings, or if they wanted to read about his (many) other reasons for being in the news; such as confessing he brought methamphetamine into the jail hidden in his “keister”, trying to outrun deputies in his red Corvette through the Chehalis Industrial Park, getting pulled over with a tennis ball sized clump of methamphetamine in his car or … you see what I mean.

The third most widely read story seems to be October crash of the Cessna from the Chehalis-based Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute that killed pilot Ken Sabin and his passengers Rod Rinta and Dr. Paul Shenk.

After that, news on July 2 that 21-year-old Ivy M. Dolowy was killed when her car crashed into a tree on state Route 6 was near the top of the list.

The name of the young woman from Chehalis shows up as the most searched for name of all.

More specifically, key phrases searched for are ranked. The most searched for terms are “Lewis County Sirens” and its variations, and next comes “Ivy Dolowy”.

However, there are so many ways to look for John Allen Booth Jr. – the former Onalaska man charged with aggravated first-degree murder in the triple homicide – that when I add those all up, a handful of people were more interested in him than her.

The next most popular story is Ronda Reynolds, the Toledo woman whose death more than a decade ago resulted in an unprecedented judicial review of a coroner’s decision last year. And then of course, author Ann Rule published her book in October renewing the public’s interest in the case.

Finally, an awful lot of people wanted to read about Donato Valle Vega, the man indicted in September after federal agents found nearly 10 pounds of cocaine in the attic of his Centralia Auto Sales business.

So those are the top six or seven stories readers were looking for when they came to Lewis County Sirens.

However, all that doesn’t really tell me what people have read the most or enjoyed reading the best, because the majority of visitors have bookmarked Lewis County Sirens and presumably just look over whatever news appears on the homepage.

I’d be very interested in hearing what readers liked, didn’t like or would hope to see written about in 2011. Feel free to send me a note or comment.

And hopefully by the end of this coming December, I will have found a statistics program that simply ranks each story by number of readers.

Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Columns and commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.