State of Local

Update: Jeff Langevin, who is one of Internet Broadcasting SEO experts, had some thoughts on this post. Rather than breaking them out separately, I’m adding them into the original post, in italics.

We’ve posted several times here on State Of Local about the need to make every page on your web site a home page. In other words, every page of your site should offer clear navigation to the other parts of your site and to the things you think would be of the most interest.

While that seems pretty intuitive, it’s not always an easy case to make to people at a local level. The traditional media model is all about the front page or opening news segment. But the web is much more random, and it’s impossible to dictate how visitors are going to access your web site.

One example of that problem is a new feature being offered up on Google. A visitor searching for a specific web site is frequently being offered not just the home page, but also a number of internal pages that Google’s search function believes visitors are most interested in seeing. Google also includes a search box that offers the chance to search the web site directly in Google.

As you can see from this example featuring local Twin Cities TV station KARE-11, there are a couple of problems with Google’s approach. The first is that it may be suggesting pages that are not helpful to visitors. In this case, along with the main news, sports and weather pages, it’s also suggesting a bridge collapse story from last August.  (However, these Sitelinks can be blocked using a Google Webmaster Tools account.) Read More… »

This TVNewsday article is getting a lot of attention today, primarily because of its basic premise: that newspaper-based web sites offer a breadth of coverage and level of writing that can’t be matched by the average television station web site. The article compares the sports coverage offered up by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the offerings from its TV station competitors.

For all the talk these days about TV on the net, the Web is still primarily a writer’s medium. It is more Gutenberg than Marconi.

And writing is what newspapers do and have been doing for a long while. In the case of the Post-Gazette,

Repurposing content from the printed pages, newspaper Web sites are filled with highly detailed local stories by beat reporters.

They have editorials; op-ed pieces; letters to the editor; obituaries; TV, movie and book critics; and usually a street-smart columnist or two who really know how to tell a story.

It truly is rich media.

Right upfront, I’ll throw out this disclaimer. IB has two partner web sites in the Pittsburgh market. So rather than talking about that specific market, let me make this a more general discussion. Read More… »

Billionaire investor Phil Anschutz, the moneyman behind the Examiner newspapers, is making a big push into local news online.

Anschutz, a sugar daddy for conservative Christian causes, created a media stir in 2004 when he bought the San Francisco Examiner and converted it into a free daily tabloid.

After his Clarity Media unit launched dead-tree freebies in Baltimore and Washington D.C. and locked up the Examiner brand name in cities across the county, some industry observers wondered if Anschutz aimed to remake the print media landscape in his image.

But it’s become clear the Examiner empire’s real focus is digital local news. Examiner.com has launched sites in 59 cities and hired former AOL executive Michael Sherrod as CEO of its internet operations. More tellingly, Examiner.com is hiring “city editors” in some of the markets to produce local content and cultivate a network of homegrown contributors. Read More… »

CBS owned-and-operated television stations have taken the wraps off of their rumored “CBS Local Ad Network,” which offers selected region-focused blogs the opportunity to pull in extra cash by embedding a local CBS news widget onto their site.

On Monday, the program launched in the five largest CBS regional markets: Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. The program will roll out in other markets serviced by CBS O&O stations within weeks.

Blogs that are approved by their respective local CBS stations will be offered up several different widgets they can embed into their site. The widgets typically include a small window of links to stories and/or video, with an accompanying ad.

While this is a new idea for local TV stations, it’s an idea that other news organizations have experimented with in recent months. Pulse360 (which also helps administer this program) is currently offering similar widgets for MSNBC politics and NBC’s “The Today Show.”

It’s not clear what the blogs participating in the CBS Local Ad Network can expect to generate in new revenue. But on the two participating sites I was able to check, the widget had a modest news window attached to a skyscraper ad. It’s a large footprint commitment for blogs, and my hunch is that some of the most successful ones won’t have the extra space to spare. While it appears that you can embed a smaller widget (with a smaller embedded ad), the result is still a healthy commitment from the blogger.
Read More… »

The Project For Excellence In Journalism has issued its annual “State Of The Media” report, and there are a number of good takeaway points that are applicable to any local news organization. But as is always the case with this type of report, take all the points as interesting nuggets of information, rather than the complete story of the state of the media.

The two points getting the most attention involve audiences and advertising.

The good news for the news business is that audiences are continuing to shift the attentions online, and the traditional media outlets are grabbing larger percentages of the market than they did in the offline world. But the downside of the story is that while the online news audience is thriving, the advertising side of the equation hasn’t kept pace. Content and advertising are increasingly becoming uncoupled, and that only increases the bottom line problems for many so-called “legacy” news organizations.

Here are a few of the highlights from the report (which really should be read in its entirety):

Increasingly, news is moving from a traditional story-based presentation to a world of options. Audiences are moving toward information on demand, to media platforms and outlets that can tell them what they want to know when they want to know it.
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This recent Newsweek article has sparked a lot of comment in online news circles. The premise (which is drawn primarily from Andrew Keen’s book “The Cult Of The Amateur” ) is that audiences are moving away from user-generated content and back towards content written and edited by professionals. It’s an idea that is appealing to many local news companies, which are struggling to find the best ways to integrate UGC into their web sites. In fact, the article was brought up in a phone call I had with one local news executive earlier this week. Aren’t people tired of all that “amateur” stuff?

No, no, no. The thrust of the Newsweek article is that readers find professionally edited sites such as Maholo or Google’s new beta site Knol much more useful than they would Wikipedia or even perhaps YouTube. And not surprisingly, executives with those companies tend to agree with the premise.

The problem with the article (and the discussion) is two-fold. The piece doesn’t give any indication that it’s a trend that is applicable to online news operations. In fact, there are a number of studies that trend the opposite way. Readers are indeed looking for a trusted local news source. But they see UGC content as part of that mix.
Read More… »