State of Local

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.

It’s true that newspapers have a much larger pool of original content to draw from. They have much larger news staffs, and long-standing partnerships and content sharing deals that often span several decades. But that large news staff is also proving to be an albatross for most newspapers. Their print editions are subsidizing the online side, and while the online ad sales growth is impressive, it’s nowhere near enough to justify the large staffs and impressive overhead.

As a result, as an industry, newspapers are moving towards smaller staffs, less beat coverage and more wire copy. So that pool of original newspaper content is growing smaller at a time when their TV competitors are figuring out ways to improve their offerings.

As anyone who’s worked in a TV newsroom can tell you, news staffs tend to be very lean and more oriented towards general assignment reporting. Few stations have the personnel for beat reporting, and the ones that do tend to concentrate on things such as “investigative teams.”

TV newsrooms are not designed to crank out stories in a rapid-fire 24/7 fashion, which is why you’ve seen such a sea change in the way all of us in the industry do business. We here at Internet Broadcasting–along with our partners–have had to invent an entirely new way of creating news and feature content. And while we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, I don’t think anyone in the TV industry thinks that we’ll be doing business the same way in a year, much less five years.

There are a lot of ways to supplement the capabilities of a local TV newsroom, and that’s something that IB has focused on in recent years. We’ve increased our original national news content, added additional content partnerships and rapidly expanded our video and interactive offerings. Our partners have worked with us to improve the content sharing between their groups. All of that increases the number of stories available locally, both for the web and for reuse on-air.

One of the untold stories from the TV side is how stations are thinking “outside the box” to increase their news production and the number of daily news stories and video. Stations are cutting partnerships with local sports blogs, covering high school sports in a way that most newspapers haven’t been able to match, and figuring out new ways to move increased amounts of video directly from the scene to the web. They’re targeting niches of coverage that aren’t being served by the print side, and using their reach and distribution to build an audience.

I’m not going to argue that all of these efforts have been successful, but that’s to be expected in such a vibrant and fast-moving environment.

But what I am going to argue is that as an industry, TV station web sites are much more energetic than they’re given credit for. And, I would modestly argue that while much of the industry focus on IB is on our managment of web sites, the untold story is the work in providing news and other content to help broaden their offerings.

You’re going to hear a lot from us in the upcoming weeks and months about this very subject. There are some very interesting projects in the pipeline both here at IB and at our partner and equity companies. And one of the functions of this blog is to help and highlight the best of them.

When you’re comparing newspaper and TV web sites, it’s fair to compare the content that is on the respective sites. But I think it’s also relevant to see in which direction both industries are moving.