State of Local

TV news stations love their brands. They splash their logos, slogans and anchor mugs on air, on billboards and the sides of big-city buses.

Stations also brand themselves online with the same smiling anchors and punchy mottos. The strategy generally enjoys limited success, with many stations still struggling to gain a sizable share of local online traffic.

One veteran executive of the digital news world has some advice for those stations: Help your brand pack its bags, drive it to the station and give it an emotional kiss goodbye. Then go home and get to work doing something useful online.

Nancy Bruner’s been doing new media for more than a decade. She just made the switch from heading digital content for the The Seattle Times Co. to leading online development for Fisher Communications. Fisher, based in Seattle, is a publicly traded firm that owns 19 TV stations and nine radio stations, plus a satellite and fiber distribution system and a data center.

Fisher brought Bruner on board shortly after buying Pegasus News, a Dallas-based site that’s trying to forge a next-generation mold for local digital media. Pegasus has a bit of everything – staff writing, aggregating, events listings and a “Daily You” algorithm that learns users’ preferences. Fisher plans to hone the model in Dallas and then adapt it to other markets.

Bruner took some time to talk about the deal and where Fisher aims to go online.

What’s the timeline for taking the Pegasus model into other markets?

We are taking a measured approach to rolling out new markets. We want to move further down the path in Dallas before we move into another market. Others in this space who have attempted to roll out new markets too quickly have failed because they did not fully understand the business model on the local level and what it would take to build a profitable model with small- to medium-sized advertisers.

Can you say which cities Fisher might venture into first?

Certainly markets where we already operate media properties make sense for Fisher; however, we do not see this as a product that requires a traditional media asset to be successful. We certainly believe in partnerships with traditional media properties as we feel it can be a very healthy relationship for both parties, but most cities offer great opportunity for the Pegasus concept.

How is the Fisher-Pegasus venture different from what newspapers are doing online?

It differs in several very significant ways. Most newspapers have approached the hyper-local model as a way to extend their core brand. Most newspaper hyper-local initiatives are simply print tabs aimed at a covering certain geographies or neighborhoods. Online is often an after-thought with the assumption that one can take the print tab and simply repackage it online. Online hyper-local models require deep databases of information and content about each neighborhood and much of the content will come from and needs to come from the community and neighborhood constituents.

Pegasus News is online-only and has been focused from the beginning about creating deep databases of information about each neighborhood it covers. It’s always been about the Web, not about print, and that has helped Pegasus create a uniquely online experience with deep connections to the neighborhoods it covers. It’s a participatory experience, one which encourages and relies on the people who live in the neighborhoods to help create the site. It’s also a neutral brand, which allows for multiple content partners, including other media partners.

Another significant difference is that its business model has always focused on small- to medium-sized advertisers. Most traditional media struggle to find a strategy and a price point that reaches out to smaller advertisers.

Perhaps the most significant difference is that Pegasus lives outside of a traditional media company. It doesn’t have to contend with legacy systems or cultures, and it doesn’t have to spend untold hours educating the core franchise about why it is doing what it is doing. It behaves as a pure-play and moves quickly and nimbly in response to the market.

Any words of wisdom to offer for mainstream media companies (TV, newspapers) struggling to increase revenue from their digital operations?

Local online media companies have a window of opportunity to create search engines that can provide deeply relevant and contextual local responses to search requests. Media companies need to develop expertise in meta-data content structures in order to create and tag content from inception through online publication; they also need to develop expertise in creating deep databases of information and the ability to search not only their own content and databases, but other properties as well to present an aggregated response to consumers.

The other thing that media companies must do is quickly jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and make their sites as participatory as possible. In the Web 2.0 world, consumers become our content distributors and we become theirs. My biggest advice to broadcast companies (who lag their newspaper counterparts by a good eight years when it comes to online development) is not to do what most newspaper companies have done—use the Web as an extension of the core brand. The Web should be embraced on its own merits as a unique medium. My colleague, Suzanne Harrison, said it best in a recent response to Undoing Structural Damage (Online Publishing Insider, 11/29):

“As long as we treat online as just an extension of traditional media, it will not realize its full potential. There are many pure plays out there that have sales teams who are focused and passionate about the medium. They are our competitors, and we cannot effectively compete without the same kind of focus and accountability. Unfortunately, a combined sales team will lead with the traditional medium, relegating the online medium to a “gift-with-purchase” or a “would you like fries with that” approach. Borrell reports that online revenues and market shares are much greater when there is a dedicated online staff. When online is treated as just an extension of the traditional medium, content also suffers. That’s when you see things that work in another medium just repurposed for the Web. Since the Web is consumed differently by both the advertiser and the consumer, the result is not as good as when content is developed specifically for the Web.”