Audience Building Initiatives

Introduction

This series of case studies showcases both operational excellence and initiatives that have successfully increase audience for newspaper Web sites.

Introduction

Audience Building Initiative: Blogs at The Spokesman-Review

By Rich Gordon

The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., has a large-scale blogging initiative that is building its Web traffic significantly. As of December 2006, the newspaper was publishing 33 blogs – 29 on Spokesman-Review.com, and four more at Spokane7.com, the newspaper’s entertainment site. This is an impressive effort for a newspaper with about 130 newsroom employees and circulation of less than 100,000 on weekdays (119,000 Sundays). More importantly, traffic to the newspaper’s blogs is increasing much more rapidly than for the rest of the newspaper’s online offerings.

History of this initiative

The Spokesman-Review stepped into blogging slowly in early 2002. Ken Sands, the newspaper’s online publisher, was looking for a new way to cover a state high school basketball tournament. When Sands explained what he wanted to do, one of the paper’s programmers said, “That sounds like a blog.” The paper set up a blog for Sands to cover the tournament. He posted 72 items over the four-day tournament. While the blog was primitive – it didn’t even include reader comments – Sands got numerous e-mails from readers and realized he had touched a chord.

“We created this online space for the community to exist which had never had a space before, and people just flocked to it,” Sands recalled.

Sands followed up with a blog launched as part of the paper’s coverage of an upcoming incorporation vote, “about the most boring topic you can imagine,” Sands said. Again, the amount of interaction the blog fostered impressed him. Sands began looking for other newspaper staff members who were interested in blogging. Dan Webster, the paper’s book and movie critics, was the first to come aboard.

“The first five or 10 took a lot of negotiation, mostly with their editors to allow them to spend the time as part of the 40-hour work week required under the paper’s union contract. But then we started to get some success and industry recognition,” Sands recalled. A New York Times article about newspaper blogging that mentioned the Spokesman-Review “was a kind of a turning point,” Sands said. “At that point something interesting happened – now the bloggers started coming to us requesting a blog.”

Blogging really took off at the Spokesman-Review in July 2002 with the arrival of Steve Smith, who believed in blogging as a vehicle for engaging the audience. “None of this could have happened without his complete support,” Sands said. “He came soon after we started blogging. We had a handful of them going by then, but it really blossomed and all the obstacles went away.”

What the data show

Because the Spokesman-Review changed its traffic-analysis systems in 2006, it is not possible to compare audience data earlier than April of 2006. But data provided by Sands for April and November 2006 shows dramatic growth in traffic for the paper’s blogs. During that period -- page views for the rest of the paper’s Web presence increased 17 percent -- blog page views increased 73 percent. In November, blogs received almost 500,000 page views, about a sixth of total Web traffic.

The paper’s audience data does not indicate the extent to which the blogs are attracting people not already visiting other parts of the subscriber-only Web site. But since traffic to both is growing, and blog traffic is growing faster, there is at least circumstantial evidence the blogs are finding a following among people who don’t use the paper’s main Web site.

How it works

One of the reasons it makes sense for the Spokesman-Review to be aggressive about blogging is that most of the paper’s print content is available online only to paid subscribers. (About 27,000 of 100,000 print subscribers have registered for online access; another 1,350 have paid $7 per month for an online-only subscription.) While this practice may have helped protect print circulation, it means that freely available, “Web-original” content such as blogs is even more critical to online growth in Spokane than elsewhere.

“That's one of the reasons, frankly, why we developed so much Web-original content,” Sands said. “We didn't want to lose all of the non-subscribers from the web audience.”

As of November 2006, these were the paper’s most popular blogs (based on page views):

1. (www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/hbo/) Huckleberries Online: the online home of longtime columnist D.F. Oliveria, an active community focusing on news, people and lifestyles in northwest Idaho . (148,000 page views in November 2006)
2. (www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/wsu/ All Cougs, All the Time: sportswriter Glenn Kasses’ blog about Washington State University athletics. (48,000 page views)
3. (www.spokane7.com/blogs/moviesandmore/) Movies & More , Dan Webster’s blog focusing on movies, books and popular culture. (30,000 page views)
4. (www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/zags/)Gonzaga Basketball: sportswriter Steve Bergum’s take on Gonzaga University’s basketball team. (26,000 page views)
5. (www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/video/) Video Journal: photographer Colin Mulvaney’s multimedia stories. (22,000 page views)

The paper’s 6th-ranked blog, News is a Conversation (www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/conversation/), reflects Smith’s belief in newsroom “transparency.” The blog “invites readers to talk about our news coverage and content on a daily basis: what they like, what they don't like, and what they'd like to see more of.”

“It really gives us a place to explain what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and send people to the raw materials and second-guess us,” Smith said. In the past year, the paper has published a series of high-profile articles about local law enforcement.

“The stories that we’ve written have been very controversial,” Smith said. “There are officials challenging the reporting and challenging the context. These blogs and forums let us explain what we’ve done and why we’ve done it, and then it enables us to provide [readers] with the raw material that people can review and decide for themselves. … Once people get into that, it takes a lot of heat off the organization and it puts the heat right back where it belongs, on the officials we’re trying to investigate.”

The Spokesman-Review has other blogs that stem from Smith’s transparency push: Ask the Editors, in which the paper’s editors answer questions from readers; and Daily Briefing, which tries to engage readers in the process of producing its news report. The paper also webcasts its daily news meetings.

The Spokesman-Review’s Web site, www.spokesmanreview.com, received the Digital Edge Award in 2006 for the best overall site for papers with circulation from 100,000 to 249,999. Judges cited the newspaper's commitment to opening the process of journalism to the community. The panel was impressed by the site's multimedia efforts, inclusion of community voices, and the way The Spokesman-Review applies its full news operation to online journalism. The paper’s entertainment site, Spokane7.com, won the entertainment Web site category for its coverage of the local music, food and cultural scenes. Judges praised Spokane7's blogs, restaurant database and collection of mp3s from local artists.

Spokesman-Review bloggers’ entries are not edited before they are posted, Sands said. “We tried at first to have each post copy-edited before it went live, but that proved to be unwieldy and an impediment to immediacy.” He said they typically ask for an editor’s advice “if they’re venturing into questionable territory.”

User comments, which have been part of the Spokesman-Review's blogs since 2003, go live as soon asthey are posted, Sands said. The blogger is supposed to review them after posting.

Sands said he works with the newspaper’s staff to make sure they understand the elements of a successful blog.

“One thing we’ve recognized is you can’t just give someone a blog and expect them to understand what that means,” Sands said. “There has to be an understanding with the writer and writer’s editor in terms of frequency of posts, editing, etc. I think 80 percent of the time [newspaper blogs] aren’t very good because they don’t know anything about interactivity, they don’t understand the need to aggregate, they don’t understand the need to post frequently.”

While there are no hard rules for the bloggers, Sands said that in general, they are expected to post at least three times per week.

Promotion and connection to print

“We do as much cross-promotion as we can,” Smith said. A box on the front page of the paper promotes interesting online content. And the paper will mention a reporter’s or columnist’s blog in what they write for the print edition.

The most successful print promotion, Smith said, comes in the form of “column-ettes” associated with its blogs. Huckleberries Online now has a daily print presence. The print Huckleberries column was originally published once per week, at about 20 column inches. Now it appears five days a week at 4-6 inches, highlighting “something that’s come up during the day or advancing something what Huckleberries is going to do online,” Smith said. The paper is now doing the same thing in the print sports section for its newer Sportslink blog.

“What we don’t do, and we’re talking about it for 2007, is external advertising for online in general,” Smith said. “For the best things we have online, we don’t advertise those like we do other aspects of the paper, and that’s going to have to change.”

Lessons from the Spokesman-Review's experience

1) Any newspaper can do this. “We’re trying very hard to show that these things can be done with a reasonable size staff,” Smith said.

2) Understand the blog format. The keys to a successful blog, Sands said, are immediacy, interactivity and aggregation (which means, Sands said, “link to your competitors – for those of us in the news business, that’s counter-intuitive.”). Also, in general, “shorter is better,” Sands said.

3) Find the right bloggers. The paper’s most successful blog, Huckleberries Online, works because Oliveria nurtures a community that revolves around his blog. He links constantly to other bloggers, runs photo caption contests and actively seeks and promotes comments from his readers. "Our least successful blogs are those where the author simply states a point of view,” Smith said. “People respond, they get angry, but they rarely advance an issue or an idea."

4) Blogging isn’t an extra assignment; it should be a core responsibility. The Spokesman-Review doesn’t ask staff members to start a blog and keep doing everything else they’re already doing. If a blog is worth doing, the staff member doing it should be freed from other responsibilities to make time for it, Sands said.

5) Be willing to kill some blogs. If a blog doesn’t seem to be working, “let’s put it on the shelf,” Sands said. “Blogging isn’t the only tool, and I don’t want people on the staff to think, ‘Just because I have a blog, I don’t have to do multimedia or podcasting or I don’t have to learn anything else.’ ”

6) Consider advertising potential as well as readership. The Spokesman-Review has a blog about recreational vehicles, which receives modest traffic. “People might tend to overlook the significance of it, but it has advertisers, and they recognize that you deliver a niche audience that is so well-targeted,” Sands said.

About the technology

The Spokesman-Review’s first blogs were published using Blogger. Later, the paper moved to Typepad to gain additional features. Now it uses technology built by the paper’s developer, Ryan Pitts. By using homegrown technology, the paper gains flexibility and reliability, Sands said.

About revenue

The Spokesman-Review has “just scratched the surface” of what’s possible in generating revenue from its blogs, Sands said.

“The difficulty is we have an organization that primarily chases big-dollar accounts, and there is big money to be made here, but in nickels and dimes at a time,” Sands said. “If we were able to sell out all of the ad spots on Huckleberries Online, we would generate $50,000 per year. But somebody has to go out and beat the bushes to find 20 to 30 advertisers who want to be on that. That’s no easy task.”

The paper does run Google AdSense ads on its blogs. “That doesn’t bring in a huge amount of money,” Sands said. “One or two advertisers on Huckleberries Online would bring in more than all the Google ad words.”

Part of the challenge is with advertisers. “Advertisers who are willing to spend $1,000 to $2,000 per month want their message to be broadcast. They want it everywhere on the site,” Sands said. “They might be better served if they paid $100 to $200 a month and had their ad in targeted areas.”

Many advertisers want their ads to appear in particular sections of the site. “We’re always running short of ad inventory space on our business pages,” Sands said. That’s one reason the paper has recently launched two new business-oriented blogs: TXT, which focuses on the Web and technology, and Here’s the Dirt, about local construction and development.

What's next

“In my view, the Web is a transitional platform,” Smith said. “None of us has a clue where it’s going to go. The blogging concepts we are playing around with now are just a piece of what we have to do.”

The paper is hiring a new online producer who will focus on managing the paper’s blogs, Smith said. He said he wants to figure out how to adapt blogging to new platforms, “how to take Huckleberrries Online and adapt it to PDAs and newsreaders and podcasts and the other kinds of technology we’re playing around with.”

One recent step was to redefine Oliveria’s job description to reduce his print responsibilities and spend more time on his blog. With the extra time, Oliveria plans to try some new things in the coming year. He'd like to blog live from the scene of an important story, such as a key commission vote. He'd also like to take his laptop to a coffee shop and interact in person with some of his readers.

"Huckleberries Online gets closest to the strategic model of what a newspaper blog can be," Smith said. "It’s a blog that breaks news, it engages citizens and the movers and shakers in dialogue. In some ways it has become its own 24/7 source of news and information for people in that community."

Smith also wants Oliveria to coach other Spokesman-Review bloggers. He wants to create comparable blog-based hubs in other outlying regions served by the newspaper. “I’m going to take whatever time I can out of his schedule and have him teach others as we try to create similar hubs in other outlying communities,” Smith said. “What Huckleberries Online has shown is that between the trained journalist and the citizen participants, you can really leverage your presence.”

Relevant links

“Case Study for an Unconference: Ken Sands brings spokesmanreview.com to BloggerCon IV” (published on Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog)

“Reality TV Meets the Newsroom: Trailblazer Steve Smith brings newspaper transparency to a whole new level” (by Mark Jurkowitz in the Boston Phoenix)

“Fortress Journalism Failed. The Transparent Newsroom Works” (by Steve Smith, published on Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog)

“Blogs as Community” (by Rich Gordon, published on the Readership Institute’s blog, covering the history and success of Huckleberries Online)

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