Mindgruve, a San Diego creative marketing agency, has been selected to lead SEO and global website analytics for Skullcandy, maker of wired and wireless headphones, earbuds and speakers. Mindgruve said its SEO team will optimize Skullcandy’s website to improve visibility in organic search, increase traffic and drive sales. Also, the firm’s analytics team will install heat maps, improve website tagging and analyze media metrics to provide key insights and strategic recommendations.
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iHeart Media’s KOGO-AM News Radio 600 has named Lou Penrose as host for the 3-to-6 p.m. weekday afternoon talk show. Penrose, with a 25-year career in political consulting, legislative affairs and radio broadcasting, replaces Carl DeMaio, who left the station last week to focus on his political career in a bid to represent California’s 50th Congressional District. Penrose has filled-in for DeMaio more than a dozen times over the past year. For 10 years (1990-2000), Penrose was a talk-show host on KNWZ in Palm Springs. During that decade, Penrose and his team won three Golden Mic Awards from the Radio & Television News Association of Southern California. Then, in December 2000, Penrose left radio to work as a deputy chief of staff for Congresswoman Mary Bono, widow of singer Sonny Bono who passed away in 1998. After four years with Bono, Penrose worked for other Republican Congressional members, including Ed Royce, Christopher Cox and John Campbell, until 2013, when he was named executive director for the Apartment Association of Orange County. Last year, he opened his own political consulting firm called Lou Penrose Government Relations.
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Darren Smith has joined sports talk-show radio station KLSD-AM XTRA 1360 Fox Sports San Diego as weekday host from noon to 3 p.m. Smith is the latest local sports broadcast personality to get a new job after previously working at rival sports talk station XPRS 1090-AM The Mighty 1090, operated by Broadcast Company of the America (BCA). BCA, operators of three San Diego radio stations that used Mexico-based transmitters, ceased business operations in April of this year. Smith had worked at XPRS since April 2003. Joining Smith for “The Darren Smith Show” at XTRA will be Marty Caswell, senior reporter and producer, who has worked with Smith since 2007. Prior to joining BCA, Smith worked from 1998 to 2002 in Bristol, Conn. at ESPN Radio, where he helped launch ESPN’s 24-hour format and produced several shows, including “The Dan Patrick Show.”
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Times of San Diego (www.timesofsandiego.com), a local news website, reports monthly readership reached 414,068 people in July, which was a 67 percent increase from the same month last year. Those readers, regarded as “unique users” in the parlance of Internet measurement, according to Google Analytics, were overwhelmingly young, mobile and local. Readers under the age of 55 accounted for nearly two-thirds of all reading sessions, and those under 45 (millennials and younger) accounted for 46 percent. This is a considerably younger reading audience than is typical for newspapers, broadcast television and other legacy media. A record 69 percent of reading sessions were on smartphones, followed by 25 percent on desktops and 6 percent on tablets. The website is designed to automatically resize for any screen size to serve mobile readers. Readers in the city of San Diego accounted for 35 percent of sessions, followed by readers elsewhere in San Diego County at 16 percent and those elsewhere in Southern California at 13 percent. The independent local news website, founded in 2014, is updated around-the-clock by a staff of seven and publishes an average of 20 articles a day on all aspects of life in the San Diego area. For advertising information, contact advertising@timesofsandiego.com.