Audience Building Initiatives: Operational Excellence in Online Audience Development: Tyler Morning Telegraph and tylerpaper.com

By Rich Gordon , Northwestern University | Posted on September 01, 2008

Introduction

Over the past two years, Rich Gordon has written a series of case studies for NAA describing newspapers' successful online audience development initiatives - databases, photo sharing, blogs, online communities and more.  The last two of these case studies will highlight newspapers that are examples of "operational excellence" in online audience development - two papers that are doing many different things to successfully build traffic on the Web.  The first case study describes a small newspaper, the Tyler Morning Telegraph in Texas.  A second case study describing successful online audience development at a metropolitan paper will be released soon.

Summary

The Tyler Telegraph (circulation 33,860 daily, 38,445 Sunday) has dramatically ramped up its Web publishing efforts in the past two years.  Through a variety of online initiatives, the paper's Web site, tylerpaper.com, has nearly quadrupled its monthly page views. Online revenue has more than quadrupled over the same period of time.  

What the data show

As with many news Web sites that have changed content management systems and metrics tools, it is not possible to compare every metric over time.   The one metric that has been tracked consistently since 2006 is monthly page views.  Here's what the data show:

• From January-September 2006, tylerpaper.com generated 7.5 million page views, an average of 830,000 per month.
• From January-September 2007, the site generated 17.3 million page views, an average of 1.9 million per month.
• From January-September 2008, the site generated 28.8 million page views, an average of 3.2 million per month.

The Telegraph has tracked unique visitors consistently since February 2007, when the site received 61,500 unique visitors.  By February 2008, the unique visitor count had risen to 206,900.  From January-September 2008, the site averaged 228,800 unique visitors per month.

Company officials were unwilling to provide detailed financial figures but said online revenue rose 70 percent in the 2006-2007 fiscal year, and an additional 92 percent in the 2007-2008 fiscal year.  In the current fiscal year, which began in July, revenue is up 26 percent, the company reports.  Add it all up, and ad revenue has more than quadrupled in a little more than two years.

History and context

The T.B. Butler Publishing Co., which publishes the Telegraph, is owned by the Clyde and Bothwell families, descendants of T.B. Butler, who purchased a newspaper in Tyler in 1910.  The Telegraph has published an online edition since the mid-1990s, but was cautious about making a major commitment to the Internet because online publishing didn\'t have a proven business model, said Nelson Clyde IV, the paper's president and publisher.  By the time of the company's annual executive committee retreat in April 2006, though, the members felt confident that the Web could be a strong business opportunity for the Telegraph. The key indicator the company was watching was the price of online advertising buys from national advertisers. "We began to see national advertising buys that valued our Web eyeballs, and the price was holding," Clyde recalled.  "This caused us to want to move quickly and establish ourselves as the market leader."

The executive committee, Clyde said, made three key decisions at that meeting:

1. To "hire a champion to run the business at a vice president level"
2. "To staff that business with enough people to support the direction" - at least seven new staff members
3. To acquire a new "best of breed" publishing platform for the Web site.

The company's leaders also realized that they needed better research and marketing.  The Telegraph engaged Belden Associates to conduct a telephone survey of the Tyler market and a separate online survey of the paper's Web site visitors. 

"We made a significant commitment financially to fund the online business," Clyde said.  "It was in excess of a million dollars, something we knew was going to impact our bottom line in the short run, but we felt it was time to act."

One key aspect of that investment was the licensing of Saxotech's online content management system to replace the Zwire platform the company had been using.  That decision came before hiring the online "champion," because the company  had "a great sense of urgency," Clyde recalled.   

"We were behind, we had treated the Web as a necessary evil," Clyde said.  "We wanted to be the market leader, we wanted to be the best, and we weren't."

The paper got about 30 applicants for the newly created position of vice president, Web enterprises.  Clyde and other company executives interviewed several of the candidates and hired Bret McCormick, who had served as a general manager, publisher and sales director for several divisions of Lee Enterprises.  In his final job at Lee, he served as general manager and sales director for a group of shopper publications in Oregon.

"On the West coast, we were just locked in a mortal battle with the Craigslists and eBays of the world," McCormick said.  "That experience really opened my eyes to the fact that we needed to be looking at alternative products, and I needed, professionally, to refocus my career path on the opportunities in interactive media."

McCormick said he had been looking for an opportunity to focus on the Web.

"Several years ago, I made the decision that I wanted to understand the online aspects of this industry better than I did.  In my mind, there was a chasm between the technology available at the time and the ability to generate revenue from that technology," McCormick said.  "In my role at Lee, I couldn't apply 100 percent of my time to online.  I made the decision that I was going to make a career change if I could find someone who would give me time to develop the online side."

"When I came in and interviewed, I let them know that I was certainly not the tech guy who writes code, but that I thought I could build audience, drive activity and ultimately monetize the online edition." 

McCormick started work at the Telegraph in August 2006.  Tylerpaper.com, at that point, basically was "repurposing the newspaper on the Web," he said.  "Above the fold, most of our content on the home page was Associated Press, and we really looked a lot like many other newspaper Web sites.  What went up the night before was what was there most of the day."

Online advertising consisted of "a lot of tile ads on the home page," sold by the newspaper's print advertising staff, McCormick said.

As digital vice president, McCormick said, "everything I do focuses on two areas: growing audience and monetization of that audience.  In a small paper with limited resources, all of our activities are guided by these two objectives."

Initiatives that have expanded the paper's online audience

1. An emphasis on breaking news

"We are serious as a heart attack about breaking news," McCormick said. "We want to be first on everything."

The site was already publishing some breaking news when McCormick arrived, but needed "a greater sense of urgency," he said.

"We want to do everything we can to be first and to get it right," McCormick said.  "When we have breaking news, everybody on the Web team knows the world stops."

A Web editor and assistant Web editor were hired and report directly to McCormick, while also working "very, very closely with the newsroom," he said.

Jim Giametta, the paper's executive editor and vice president/news, said he was happy to see the company making a bigger investment in the Web.  Before McCormick and the two new Web editors arrived, the Telegraph mostly used the Web site as a supplement to print, Giametta said.  The paper might post the full text of an indictment online, or use the Web site to publish a story about a late event that finished after the paper's press deadline.  But the paper's old publishing platform was cumbersome and slow, Giametta said. 

"When we made the decision to go 24/7 and we were actually scooping the paper, covering breaking news and going on the Web first, there was some apprehension at first," Giametta said.  "But then there was the sense of pride that kicked in."

"Now the staff wants to be first on the scene of something and get it back on the Web," Giametta said. "It's a sense of accomplishment - hey, we beat the other media in town."  

An example occurred in August 2007, when the newsroom got a report of a fire in a five-bedroom house in nearby Flint.  The newsroom dispatched a reporter and photographer.  The Web team assigned its developer to start creating maps, dispatched additional freelance photographers and "put all hands on deck," McCormick recalled. The paper's coverage of the fire includes multiple news stories, profiles of the two volunteer firefighters who were killed in the fire, a guestbook for tributes to the victims and a photo gallery that has been viewed  more than 140,000 times.

Giametta has worked at the paper for 20 years, the last 15 as executive editor.  He said there is a good partnership between the online team and his staff of 32 journalists.  Managing editor Dave Berry is in constant communication with Web editor Tom Mitsoff.  "The Web team is right in the middle of the newsroom, right next to the copy desk, so there's a lot of communication that goes on between the desk and the Web team."

"If our police reporter is out on a fatality, he will call in to our main desk, talk to the assistant managing editor or news editor and give them basic reporting, simple facts that can get on the Web right away," Giametta said.  "We can say we're a 24/7 newspaper and no one can challenge that - that's what we do.  We produce the news, and it's good to be part of that team."

2. Constant revision of the home page based on usage data

"I didn't walk into the newsroom and say, 'We're changing our content on the Web site,' " McCormick said.  "Every day we watched and tracked the most-read stories on our site, and we started migrating that content to the top of the home page."

"A few years ago, we might see 500 page views for our top story.  Now we get at least 500 page views for 20 or more stories a day," McCormick said.  "Our top stories will now run 2,000-plus page views in a day."

Breaking news is a big part of the growth of the site, but even when there isn't much breaking news to report, it's important to revise the home page "to give the appearance that the Web site is being updated all the time," McCormick said.

"Every half-hour to an hour we update the content," McCormick said.  "There's continually something changing.  Sometimes it\'s as simple as a photo change, and the best local photo is the rule of the day."

McCormick and Mitsoff are constantly looking at traffic data and using it to drive Web content decisions. "We've tried to take a very clinical view," McCormick said.  "If a story is getting traffic, just try to give people more of whatever that is, and try to do it as quickly as possible."

Traffic data provided by the Web team was helpful to the newsroom, Giametta said.  "They would share reports with us on what kind of hits we were getting on certain stories, and that was really good feedback for the reporters," he said.  "The reporters kind of got into it, too.  They'd say their story was number three or number two [in page views], and that helped with morale."

The paper's research has found that the core audience for the Web site "skews towards mid-40s women."  This knowledge drives news and photo selection for the home page.  For example, one day in July, the site was featuring a photo gallery of the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden as the lead item on the home page.  "That gallery will be devoured by our core demographic," McCormick said. 

3. Heavy use of photo galleries, many of them shot by local volunteers

One of the first decisions the Telegraph leadership made after hiring McCormick was to license the Spotted photo-gallery product from Morris DigitalWorks.  Spotted has been hugely successful in driving traffic on sites operated by Morris Communications, parent of Morris DigitalWorks.  The key to the traffic growth is sending photographers - mostly interns or community members - to take pictures of people attending public events.  In addition, Spotted allows anyone in the community to upload and share photos.

The Telegraph adopted Morris' approach, hiring a full-time administrator for Spotted and setting performance standards (number of photos and galleries) into her employment agreement.  The paper set out to recruit photographers and now has almost 20 of them, McCormick said. (See this. NAA Audience Building Initiative case study on Spotted for more information on the program.)

The biggest initial success with Spotted was in high school sports. "We found some really passionate people at each school who were already out there on the sideline with high-end photographic equipment," McCormick said.  "We stood on the sidelines with them and listened to what they had to say, and discovered many of them felt the paper wasn't giving their school enough attention."

The paper's proposition to these photographers: Give them a "cool orange vest" with the Spotted logo on the back, provide them with business cards designating them as a "Tylerpaper.com freelancer," and offer them a share of the sales price for any images resold through the paper's Web site. (Photographers earn 2% to 30% of the sales price depending on how much business they generate.)

"This has really caught on in a big, big way.  We send out a volunteer list, listing events and ask them to sign up.  That's how we get this enormous amount of photographic material coming in all of the time," McCormick said.

In any given month, Spotted accounts for 20 to 40 percent of the site's page views, McCormick said.  "We shoot it all.  We try to make sure we get band photos, cheerleader photos, action photos and plenty of fan photos."

The site sells photos through a partnership with MyCapture, a service of Second Street Media Solutions. Using MyCapture, customers can buy reprints or have photos put on coffee mugs, T-shirts and other products.  MyCapture handles the transaction and shares the revenue with the Telegraph.

4. Addition of new features and services

McCormick is constantly looking for ways to expand the services and content available on the Web site, and to increase revenues.  Since he arrived, the site has added:

• An improved online employment site, powered by The Job Network
• Article commenting and discussion forums, using Saxotech's software
• A video site - Tylertube.com - with technology provided by CellJournalist and videos provided by the Telegraph staff as well as the community 
• A contest engine (provided by Upickem.com) that is being used for contests such as picking the winners of high school football games.

McCormick says he spends quite a bit of time talking to people he respects in online publishing to learn about vendors that offer good technology solutions. "I have to really pay attention to who's out there and who are the up and comers" among vendors, he said. Through these kinds of contacts, for instance, he learned about Celljournalist and its video platform. He was able to sign a contract with Celljournalist "at a time where we could afford them." If he had waited for Celljournalist to sign a deal with a large, multi-newspaper company, they might not have been so eager to sign up the Telegraph, McCormick said.

Celljournalist\'s platform provides the Telegraph with most of the key functionality that YouTube has: the ability to upload videos, rate and comment on them and embed videos on other sites.  McCormick said the platform also allows for "monetization opportunities" -- pre-roll and overlay ads -- although the paper hasn\'t begun selling these.

While TylerTube allows the public to upload video to the site, at this point the majority of the videos are submitted by the newspaper\'s staff.   In August,t he Telegraph developed a one-day session (led by Erin King, the paper\'s Spotted administrator, who studied filmmaking in college) to train reporters and photographers in video shooting and production techniques. The paper purchased 10 Casio Exilim digital still cameras, which can shoot up to 60 minutes of video as well as stills, and makes them available to newsroom staff members. 

Since the training, the newsroom and online staffs have shot and uploaded dozens of videos.  When Hurricane Ike swept through Texas, staff members shot and uploaded a series of videos on damage caused by the high winds -- such as a mobile home severely damaged by a fallen tree.

Traffic to TylerTube is still modest - about 10,000 page views a month - but is growing, McCormick said.

Staffing and organizational structure

When the company decided to ramp up its investment in the tylerpaper.com Web site, they decided to create a separate online division with a staff of at least seven full-time people.  "We knew that was going to impact our bottom line in the short run, but we felt it was time to act," Clyde said.  The positions were not all filled immediately; in fact, the two online-only sales representatives were just added this year.  "We've really just filled out our staffing plans almost 2 years later."

In addition to McCormick, the online team consists of:

• Two editorial staff (a Web editor and assistant editor)
• One full-time developer
• An online sales manager who also serves as national ad manager
• Two full-time online sales representatives
• The full-time Spotted administrator and a second person who works part-time on Spotted
• A Web administrative manager who is a "jack of all trades," helping the developer, assisting with Spotted and overseeing the online advertising management system.

The decision to separate the online division organizationally from the print operation created some challenges, but was the right thing to do, Clyde said.

"You've got to get over some of the initial issues that print people see the Web as a predator," Clyde said.  "It's been to our advantage for our Web champion to have the bit in his mouth and take people to places that are uncomfortable to them, that they wouldn't have gone by themselves."

McCormick acknowledged that his efforts to ramp up the online operation have sometimes created conflict with other departments.  Clyde, he said, has insisted that they find common ground.  "It just takes a commitment," McCormick said.  "Our photographers, for instance, didn't originally embrace the Spotted concept, but the publisher said this is the right thing to do, and with Jim Giametta\'s leadership we made it happen."

The key, Clyde said, has been "collaborative dialogue."

"There is no question that we have had conflict, and I expected conflict in this process," Clyde said.  "The ability of our people to rally around things that made them uncomfortable has made our Web site better." 

Audience measurement

The Telegraph uses a variety of tools to  measure and understand its online audience:

• Omniture SiteCatalyst provides real-time measurement of usage, including counts of pageviews and unique visitors
• The paper has begun using Quantcast to allow its traffic figures to be compared with other sites of its size, which aren't generally measured by the major panel-based ratings services, Nielsen NetRatings and comScore.
• Belden Associates conducts surveys of site visitors approximately once a year.

Promotion and connections to print

Audio 1 (Butterfly) Audio 2 (He\'s Perfect) Audio 3 (Tyler Autos) Audio 4 (Tyler Jobs) Video

Even before hiring McCormick, Telegraph executives decided to launch a new promotional campaign for the newspaper and its Web site.  

"We hired an ad agency to come in and brand the product," Clyde said.  "They did brand the newspaper and the Web site, and we did the best commercial we've ever done."

There were actually three commercials: one featuring a young, time-pressed professional woman who uses tylerpaper.com, another featuring a barber at work who gets his news from the print edition, and one combining the two.  The campaign slogan: "My News, My Way." 

"Our marketing investment in TV alone was $250,000, and those numbers don't make sense right away, but we felt very strongly that we had to establish our position in the market, and it was going to take an investment like that to do so," Clyde said.

In the first year after McCormick's arrival, the paper made heavy use of in-paper promotion for the Web site and its online classified products.  "You couldn't look at a page without there being an ad for Tylerpaper.com," McCormick recalled.

In general, any time a major new product launches, the paper invests in out-of-paper promotion, McCormick said.  The paper has run radio campaigns for Spotted, for a "Capture the Spirit" photo contest and for the paper's employment and auto verticals.

"We try to offer best-of-breed verticals, put them front and center, and promote them like a rock concert," McCormick said.

Business and revenue strategy

The online expansion plan that the Telegraph created in 2006 was not driven by declines in print revenue, Clyde said.  Even in 2007-2008, the paper's overall revenue was up from the previous year, with classified and retail advertising down and national and online advertising up, he said.   The decision to invest in the Web site was driven by a realization that there was a good business opportunity, Clyde said.

Clyde would not release specific revenue and expense figures for the online operation, but he said the company hoped to deliver "seven figures" in online revenue and achieve profitability in the online division before the fifth year (2010-2011).  He said he thinks there is a chance the online division can be profitable as early as the current fiscal year, which began July 1.

"We used to treat the Web as a necessary evil and we sold what we could sell.  We were just scraping what we could scrape out of the market," Clyde said.  "We've now defined our Web site as a viable business and it's going places."

Lessons from the Telegraph's experience

• Emphasize local breaking news.  "We have created a greater sense of urgency in getting the stories posted.  We want to do everything we can to be first and to get it right," McCormick said.
• Monitor and apply traffic data to revise and refresh your home page.  "Empower your Web editor to move content based on reader consumption," McCormick said.  "Watch your numbers all the time."
• Photos and photo galleries drive traffic.  "A picture is worth a thousand words, so let's give 'em a thousand pictures, because it's also worth a thousand page views," McCormick said.
• Promote your online products.  "We as an industry do a terrible job of promoting ourselves," McCormick said. "We have dedicated resources and time to make sure that every aspect of our Web site is being promoted."
• Assign responsibility and accountability for online success.  "I believe having a champion for the online business is every bit as important as having a circulation director or an advertising director," Clyde said.