I love to feed people. There's so much joy in gathering with family and friends over good food. And when I'm not cooking, I have a ton of fun exploring the culinary diversity our city’s restaurant scene has to offer.
But this isn't the case for everyone.
Every day, thousands of our neighbors, our children’s classmates, people we pass on the street, struggle to have enough food on their plates. Terms like “food insecurity” are used today, because "hunger" can be too scary and uncomfortable. But that's what it is. It's hunger. People we all know go hungry some days so their kids can eat, have poor nutrition because that’s all they can afford. Or worse.
I don’t think about them every day, I don’t do my part as much as I should, but our long standing partnership with the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank — I hope — has a positive impact, no matter how small.
Last week, our friend Brian Gulish, VP of Marketing & Communications for the Food Bank, came to visit us at our Downtown HQ. We discussed various way to stay involved, volunteering being one of them. And what was awesome is that he came up with a way to make it possible to do it alongside a few of you.
On Oct. 6, noon to 3:30 p.m., members of our staff at DK Pittsburgh Sports will volunteer at the Food Bank's new facility in Duquesne, Pa., and we're inviting 10 of you to join us!
We’ll first meet over lunch for a chance for us to spend some time with our guests, followed by a two-hour volunteer session, and ending with a tour of the facility. You’ll be amazed, as I was recently, by the extraordinary work they do every day. And the challenges that go into getting it done.
We hope that each one of our guest volunteers can make a $100 donation to the Food Bank. If you're interested in being one of them, please email me at Dali@DKPittsburghSports.com
Thank you in advance for always being by our side!
Oh, and next week, stay tuned for another gathering I've got to announce!
MILITARY COUNT: 345
Our annual Military Drive, which has a 2022 goal of funding 2,022 free subscriptions for our veterans, has opened through three weeks with 345 purchases, including 2 in the past week.
That's obviously a low figure for the week. Hoping to get it going again in the coming week.
To contribute one or more at $20 each, email me directly -- DK@DKPittsburghSports.com -- or stop in and see us Downtown to do that. -- Dejan
GIGER TO FULL-TIME
Cory Giger, who's been covering Penn State a little more than a year for us, was upgraded to full-time status in the past week.
In addition to covering the Nittany Lions, he'll write about other colleges, as well as assuming the back-end duties left by the looming departure of his Altoona bud, Jarrod Prugar. In fact, Jarrod will be training Cory on all that in the days to come to smooth the transition.
Fans of the Nittany Lions have told us they've enjoyed Cory's coverage, and we're happy to have that cemented. -- Dejan
INSIDE THE WORKS
• Giving serious thought to going ad-free on articles. But it'd be expensive, and we'd need a new revenue stream to make up for it. More than $50K annually. All I'll say for now.
• We've conducted several interviews for several hiring goals we've had of late. These are mostly in multimedia, but we're also seeking help in social media.
• I don't have enough superlatives for the coverage Taylor Haase and Danny Shirey are offering on the Penguins right now. Longtime readers can attest I'm not one to say that we're the 'best' at this or that. I prefer instead to say that we're trying to be the best. But in this case ... yeah, nobody's doing it like these two.
• It was neat having Eddie Provident on location with us in Cleveland for the football game. That's a learning process, to see how to best utilize his multimedia talents toward reaching not only our existing readers but also new ones. Kickoff being so late made this a challenge -- we didn't get done until dawn -- but we gave it a hard collective push, including Chris Halicke and Ramon Foster, to deliver all the content you're accustomed to seeing for a standard 1 p.m. kickoff, and we were pretty proud of it.
• Would very much welcome feedback on that coverage, by the way. Feel free to share in comments.
• Stop right now and go customize your bar at the bottom of the app with your favorite teams. Here's how. , we rearranged the available order to something more logical.
• This talk show's not yet ready for unveiling. When we do it, we'll do it right. -- Dejan
BACK TO BUSINESS
• Our page views for the past week were 490,631, with our weekly goal being 500,000. Our most-read original pieces were my two Steelers game columns, the home opener at 10,161, and the one from Cleveland at 9,712. I cite both only because the latter one's on pace to overtake the former. Broken down by team traffic, articles on the Steelers brought 28.4% of our readership, the Pirates 14.6%, the Penguins 10.1%, Penn State 3.8%, and Pitt 2.3%.
• On the multimedia front, our podcast downloads for the past week were 189,003, with our weekly goal being 200,000, and our YouTube video views for the past week were 157,165, with our weekly goal being 150,000.
• Our company social media accounts are at 47,145 followers on Twitter, 37,755 on Facebook, 14,608 on Instagram, 16,820 on YouTube.
• We make mistakes. If you see one, email: Typos@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Anything you need, including lost/forgotten passwords, email: Help@DKPittsburghSports.com
