State of Local

MSN Live Search, which has been trailing Google by around 60 percentage points in usage over the past few months, unveiled a direct competitor to Google’s news aggregator this week. Live Search News was first reported by CNet on Tuesday night. The Live Search Blog has yet to announce the launch.

As a user, you get a simple main column of top stories that appears to be accurately detecting duplicates and suggesting relateds. A right sidebar highlights news from local sources, presumably by detecting my IP. It got my state right, but all eight stories are from the same source: the local CBS TV station. It’s odd, because while some major local publications are being left out of the index entirely, several others are in — and just not listed as local.

So as a publisher, the first thing to do is make sure your site is included in the results. You can use the site: operator command to view the stories on your domain that Live has in its index.

For example, most of our Internet Broadcasting sites are doing well. The top results for WNBC, Channel3000 and Click2Houston are all fairly recent — not “live,” but within the past hour or two. (Strangely, all three have exactly 126 results.) Read More… »

The official Google News blog did a post today to confirm/deny some truths/rumors about how it indexes and ranks stories.

It’s important to note that these learnings apply only to Google News results, not to Google Web results. (Here at Internet Broadcasting, the Web:News referral ratio for our sites is about 25:1.) Still, Google News accounts for a lot of traffic, and it’s something for which we optimize and about which we school our editors.

Most notable to me in this post:

1. Google News only visits a story once. It never comes back to check for updates. (The Google Web spiders, of course, will return.) This could bite local publishers in the treatment of developing news, when it might be easier to rewrite an existing story, rather than create a new one. For example, your site may say Barbaro is dead, but your Google News snippet will forever read that the horse is merely ailing.

Our recommendation would be that if the news significantly changes — headline and nut graph — it’s best to create a new story with a new URL and link to the previous one(s) for context. Read More… »

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… »