Source:Google Analytics, Public Media Metrics. Larger image.
Local news helps draw web traffic for San Diego site
For more than a decade, public radio and TV stations have been struggling to find the key to online success. The most promising opportunity appeared quite early, as listeners clamored to hear and watch online streams. Audio and video were a natural, and the explosion of smartphones played to this strength.
What else could stations offer beyond that? The answer is emerging from a handful of stations, some all-news radio and some radio/TV joint licensees, that are building an audience for their online news.
The impact of gains in online news is easy to see in sites run by public broadcasters such as Boston’s WBUR, Minnesota Public Radio and San Diego’s KPBS-TV/FM. But those gains did not come quickly or easily. Even stations with substantial news departments faced three barriers to connecting with an online news audience:
- Emphasis: Stations had to overcome their practice of using home pages to promote every aspect of their services, including program schedules. They had not presented their home pages as prime news sources.
- Volume: They did not have the volume of news required to attract return visits.
- Text: They did not present the news in text, except for the story headlines, even though text is the form that hurried news-seekers want. Instead, the news was encased in an audio file.
This last point has been public radio’s Achilles heel as an online news purveyor. Minnesota Public Radio had one of the first newsrooms in the field to train its staff to convert local news to text, and it remained almost the only station to do so until 2008.
Then in the spring of 2009, the web team at Boston’s WBUR broke away from the prevailing model with two innovations: They redesigned their home page along the lines of major news sites, limiting the space devoted to navigation, branding and program promotion and dramatically expanding the space for news. Second, they brought in quantity by pulling in a text feed of NPR reporting through the network’s application programming interface (API).
Over the past 18 months, Public Media Metrics, a tracking service that provides comparative web analytics to public broadcasters, has been seeing steady growth in the use of online news at some all-news public radio stations and some stand-out joint licensees.
The standouts include the sites of MPR, WBUR, large-budget operations with much larger-than-average news and web staffs. But similar gains in online news also are seen at Michigan Radio, Ann Arbor; Vermont Public Radio; Louisville Public Media; KUER-FM in Salt Lake City; and KWMU-FM in St. Louis.
Gains in online news traffic can also be seen at joint licensees with substantial radio news departments, including WXXI, Rochester; WUSF, Tampa; Georgia Public Broadcasting, Atlanta; KPBS, San Diego; KQED, San Francisco; and Oregon Public Broadcasting, Portland.
In terms of monthly visitors measured by Google Analytics, these news-station and joint-licensee sites have generally grown faster than average, year-to-year. Over the past three years, use of the average station site tracked by PMM has increased by about 15 percent a year, while the sites at radio news stations and joint licensees with a news radio station have grown at about 27 percent a year. The news sites showed their strongest gains during and after the November midterm elections, when they literally doubled their online visits over their November 2009 levels.
All of these comparisons are blurred by the constant updating, additions and reorganization taking place at the most web-active stations. Still, our communication with the individual stations confirms the basic trends: Stations with a strong commitment to online news are making steady gains in visits.
San Diego’s local news expansion
Apart from Minnesota Public Radio and WBUR, the station that has demonstrated the strongest, continuous improvement in online news traffic is KPBS in San Diego. Its performance may mean more to public stations around the country than the successes of MPR or WBUR, because those two stations are often assumed to maintain a permanent head start.
Monthly visits to KPBS’s website have almost quadrupled in three years. Monthly pageviews have tripled in the same time from 277,000 to 824,000 per month, with 60 percent of the growth coming from increased viewing of news pages (a tenfold jump, from 31,000 to 346,000).
When asked about the factors leading to these improvements, Tammy Carpowich, director of interactive strategy at KPBS, pointed first to personnel changes that came in 2006. “We moved four full-time positions from different departments and reassigned them to new media. That change resulted in an increase of our visits by about 125 percent.”
The second factor driving improved performance was technical. In 2009 KPBS installed Ellington, a sophtisticated news publishing system built by the online news team at the Lawrence Journal-World, led by online news pioneer Rob Curley. Even though the previous content management system was adequate, Ellington dramatically improved the search optimization of KPBS news stories, which led to a substantial gain in search-driven visits.
The third, most recent factor propelling KPBS’s growth in online news has been hiring Suzanne Marmion as news director.
Marmion orchestrated the final steps toward a true web-broadcast newsroom convergence and brought a new sensibility to editorial selection. Leng Caloh, convergence editor for KPBS, explained it this way: Marmion “took feedback about the types of stories that did really well ... and responded to the desire for breaking news on our site.”
Similar influences drive the growth at these three active news sites — WBUR, MPR and KPBS: increased staffing, investments in appropriate technology and constant attention to user interests. What may be most impressive is that the traffic growth at the three sites has been fueled by local news collected and posted by station reporters. The provision of national news from the NPR database has been far less important, at least so far, than the increased volume of local news produced within “the converged newsrooms.”
What these stations are demonstrating is that public broadcasters can build an audience for multiplatform news production if senior management provides the resources and the news teams have strong leadership.
Mark Fuerst is a contributing editor of Current and president of Innovation4Media, publisher of Public Media Metrics, a tracking report for online service in public media. Comments, questions, tips?
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