State of Local

Singer Mary-Chapin Carpenter once noted that “sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” And I suspect many local news operations have felt a bit like both in recent years.

As print circulation and advertising swoon, the newspaper industry, and news providers generally, have looked for a lifeboat online. And there have been some promising pieces of news in the online advertising market.

The Newspaper Association Of America’s Randy Bennett recently pointed out that in 2003, newspapers collected a mere $1.2 billion from their online operations; last year the figure was nearly $2.7 billion. “We’re growing at a double-digit rate,” he says.

But as The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi notes in this column (which comes from the January issue of The American Journalism Review), there are some serious challenges on the horizon. Overall traffic growth for online news sites in general has slowed to a trickle, and there seems to be some audience consolidation taking place.

• After years of robust increases, the online newspaper audience seems to have all but stopped growing. The number of unique visitors to newspaper Web sites was almost flat – up just 2.3 percent – between August 2006 and August 2007, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The total number of pages viewed by this audience has plateaued, growing just 1.8 percent last year.
• Newspaper Web sites are attracting lots of visitors, but aren’t keeping them around for long. The typical visitor to nytimes.com, which attracts more than 10 percent of the entire newspaper industry’s traffic online, spent an average of just 34 minutes and 53 seconds browsing its richly detailed offerings in October. That’s 34 minutes and 53 seconds per month, or about 68 seconds per day online. Slim as that is, it’s actually about three times longer than the average of the next nine largest newspaper sites. And it’s less than half as long as visitors spent on the Web’s leading sites, such as those run by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.–As competition for visitors grows, news sites are rapidly segmenting into winners and losers. In a yearlong study of 160 news-based Web sites (everything from usatoday.com to technorati.com), Thomas E. Patterson of Harvard University found a kind of two-tier news system developing: Traffic is still increasing at sites of well-known national brands (the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, etc.), but it is falling, sometimes sharply, at mid-size and smaller newspaper sites.Local news sites benefit in theory from having a built-in relationship with local readers. But as these statistics show, that relationship will disappear unless you work hard to engage the readers, and keep them coming back. It’s impossible to compete with the scale of a CNN or NY Times, and it’s not even enough to be the dominate news voice in your local market.It’s about integrating your audience into your web site(s). Finding ways to engage them and keep them on your site for longer periods of time. That involves a rapidly evolving mix of forums, games, news features, videos, UCG and whatever else it takes.Take a look at the front page of your site today and ask yourself this question. “If I didn’t work here, how long would I spend on this site?”