05 | 20 | 2008

Community Journalists Learn to 'Be Web Now'

Kathleen Powers, editor of the weekly Somerville Journal just outside Boston, has a three-and-a-half person newsroom, and somehow manages to robustly cover a city with nearly 80,000 residents both in print and online. "Between print and online, it's nonstop," she says. "But you get used to it.'

As Powers has learned, the key to success is being local and being online -- no matter the size of your staff or your budget.

Consumers are demanding online content. According to a recent study by newspaper research and consulting firm Belden Associates titled, "Be Web Now," the key for newspapers to "being the dominant local (news) source" is getting that news and information online. The report combines the findings of 81 online studies and involved more than 66,000 total interviews.

The challenge is how to allocate resources: How integrated should the newsroom and back end be? What should the staff levels be for print and online, if the newsroom isn't integrated? What should be the responsibilities of each department? How should the business models and budgets for each department work and interact?

The growth of the Internet as a source for news is forcing papers of all sizes to answer those questions. Last year, average monthly unique audience figures for newspaper Web sites grew by more than 3.6 million, increasing more than 6 percent from 2006, according to a Nielsen Online report done for the Newspaper Association of America. In 2007's final quarter, monthly unique visitors to newspaper Web sites averaged 62.8 million, the largest of any quarter since 2004, when NAA began tracking online usage.

While all newspapers wrestle with this dilemma, small weekly and daily newspapers generally are more cash-strapped than their big-city cousins. Many publishers of suburban and community newspapers are loath to make any heavy investments into the online world.

Susan Karol, executive director of the Suburban Newspapers of America Foundation, said there are several things holding back papers from growing online, including:

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Fear of change and/or damaging the print product
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Traditional journalists not being trained in multimedia
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Limited resources and/or technological know-how
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Lack of good role models in the industry

Benjamin N. Hall, secretary of the SNA Foundation and president and founder of Digital Press Consortium, which helps small and mid-size papers make the transition online, said one of the biggest challenges he sees is "overcoming the sense of entitlement" papers have from serving communities in the same way for so long. "We have to work hard to win audiences online just like everybody else," he said.

The good news: The "Be Web Now" study concludes that newspaper Web sites deliver the best local audiences of any mass medium in local markets. Consider these audience demographics cited in the report:

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55 percent are women
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Median age is 45
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Median income is $67,600
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70 percent are from the local area and are homeowners
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80 percent are employed
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65 percent are white collar

The study also found that the audience is dedicated, using the Internet 6.6 days per week and visiting the local site 2.8 times a day on weekdays.

To help suburban and community journalists take advantage of these numbers and make the transformation to a multimedia world, SNA has received a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to create e-learning through Poynter's NewsU. The first of three free courses to be funded by the grant, "Build and Engage Local Audiences Online," is now available. In the course, editors and publishers from across the industry, including Somerville's Powers, share their stories and their strategies for success, and participants can create their own plan for learning more about potential online audiences and ways to reach them.

"Suburban and community newspapers are realizing that they can extend their trusted brand online and, thus, further expand their influence and serve their communities in even bigger and more relevant ways," SNA's Karol said. This is most true for small and mid-size papers, she said, because the Web can allow these papers to do things they can't in print, such as transforming weekly papers into daily ones online or providing much more content than can fit in the print edition.

One of the big fears of investing in the Internet by newspaper publishers is that the Web site will "cannibalize" the paper's readership. "Newspapers are so afraid of cannibalization that it stifles innovation," Hall said.

Indra Chapman, senior research project director at Belden, is currently studying the correlation between the increase in Web site usage and decrease in readership levels in one Midwest state. She has discovered that the rise in online readership has very little to do with the decrease in print readership.

"Radio and television have become more fragmented. Magazines have dwindled. Newspapers have actually done a remarkable job of maintaining their audience," she said.

One of the most important stats in this year's "Be Web Now" is cause for celebration: "Most sites have not even come close to reaching their total opportunity."

Newspaper-site reach typically ranges between 5 percent and 25 percent of local adults. And while that is more than any competing radio stations, it still leaves a huge chunk of potential audience for newspapers and their corresponding Web sites to go after.

So what to do? Al Bonner, the general manager at Lawrence Journal-World and LJWorld.com in Kansas, as well as a board member for the SNA Foundation, says one of the key components is getting management onboard. "(Papers) have to get people on the bus or it will leave them behind,' he said. "That starts with upper management."

The Lawrence site has been online since 1995 and has never charged or required registration, which Bonner thinks has raised traffic numbers significantly. "The company's goal is to provide fair, accurate and honest information to the community in the quickest and most dependable manner."

The shift from thinking of its business as an information business rather than a newspaper one was helpful in making the transition to a media-agnostic platform, Bonner said.

Karol said that the change will come out of necessity. "It is clear that audiences now access information in a variety of ways," she said. Expectations and needs have changed. "However, local residents still depend on their local newspaper to provide them with the essential news and information about their community," she said -- information that can't be gained anywhere else.

Local papers still have that historical bond to build on, Karol said. "But, this relationship will not be sustained forever ... Local newspapers need to better understand how technological changes have affected the ways audiences consume and interact with their local news sources and transform accordingly in order to continue a high level of influence and service to their communities."