State of Local

Dan Finnegan, the former head of Yahoo’s HotJobs property, is quoted in the NY Times today saying this:

Businesses like travel, shopping, music and even HotJobs were all great products, but none were going to make a huge difference in the fight with Google unless we used them to drive the main search business.

HotJobs has been the main focus of the Yahoo / Newspaper consortium to date. While, in the short-run, HotJobs did get Yahoo the ability to distribute search onto all their newspaper partner sites, is that how Dan meant the quote? My experience has been that Dan’s sentiment generally = vertical search (or, more accurately, Universal Search). It’s about driving query volume for the core search property. If that’s actually the case - and Yahoo is starting to focus on driving core search volume at the expense of their “local” verticals - how much will that hurt help their newspaper partners?

Ken Doctor and Terry Heaton have been providing good insight into the Yahoo - Newspaper consortium for some time now.

Northwestern University’s Medill School and Kellogg School Of Management recently conducted a study in which 14 to 18-year-old participants were asked to describe the time they spend on YouTube or social networking sites, and contrast that to time spent on news sites.

Many of the participants described time spent on YouTube or social networking and music downloading sites as a treat or time-out. But they considered their online news experiences as stressful or a reminder of the world’s dangers.

The study drew some conclusions that should be of extreme interest to any local news operation:

The research found:

• News isn’t that important to teens right now.
Particularly news of politics, government, public affairs and other subjects that journalists might call “serious news.” Other things are more compelling. In addition, following the news is stressful for teens: it reminds them of the peril in the world.

• Local news sites aren’t much on their radar screens.
Teens are not interested enough to go out of their way for news. So whatever news pops up in front of them when they turn on their computers – usually the large Internet portals and news aggregators – is what they see.
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One of the biggest challenges any local news organization has faced in recent years has been reorganizing the process of gathering and publishing news across a number of platforms. Local journalism now includes not just the traditional broadcast or print market, but the web, mobile, video, rss, widgets, radio and whatever else comes along.

It’s difficult to find the optimal mix of resources for each task. There are budgetary issues, and in many cases, news organizations have had to revamp their entire business model to survive.

One such reinvention was at the Manchester, U.K. newspaper the Evening News, which decided to make the paper free in central Manchester, while keeping paid-for distribution in the city’s outskirts. That move was part of a larger move to convergence of its different media outlets (which include 23 local weeklies, the flagship daily, the Channel M TV station and several radio stations).

The changes began in 2000, and the results have not only boosted the bottom line, but led to an integrated regional newsroom where all the various outlets share content, staff and other resources.

That central news hub is an interesting development, and its one that makes sense for local news outlets that have several different media businesses. According to Paul Horrocks, editor of MEN, the changes have completely altered the way that organization gathers news. Read More… »

On Thursday, LIN TV Corp. launched a local political website in each of the Company’s 17 markets. Each local political website includes news headline feeds from a variety of area traditional media outlets as well as local and regional political blogs. There is a also a bunch of candidate profiles, voting info and other political research and poll results.

The company owns each of the 50 states local politics.tv domain names, as well as all of the top DMA local politics.tv domain names. One example is Indianapolitics.tv.

Each site includes AP wire stories and video, as well as video and stories from local media partners.

One interesting aspect is that the individual sites include a lot of links to local political blogs, and they appear to be hoping to be a “go-to” aggregator for local political coverage. There’s a prominent “Blog Central” index on the front page, and a link to the main blog story aggregation section is prominently at the top of every page.

It’s an interesting move, and it just shows that local politics verticals are probably going to be the next battleground for local news sites. Local high school sports was the battleground in 2007, and this looks to be the next place where traditional media sites hope to gather some traction.

It’s important to be able to accurately judge the reach of a local news site. It’s not just the page views or unique monthly visits. It’s how vital the site is to its core users. Does it have value to advertisers? Is it a factor in the blogosphere?

When you travel into an examination of those metrics, you can rapidly find yourself getting into trouble. What seems to be accurate numbers can often be skewed, or wildly misinterpreted if you don’t pay attention to where those numbers come from and how they are compiled.

Uber-media blogger Jeff Jarvis recently took a swing at using new metrics to measure the popularity and effectiveness of the leading Democratic presidential candidates. While that might not seem like a “local news” issue, the post illustrates some of the problems all of us run into when looking at metrics such as Google searches or YouTube video view numbers.

Google searches: Here, in a chart representing December 2007 in the U.S., we see Clinton generally ahead of Obama but with her falling and then showing a resurgence. What do searches indicate? I think they can at least measure interest if not affection or affiliation.

The problem with examining search numbers is that there’s no way of determining what people are looking for and why. Someone searching for “way to volunteer for Hillary Clinton” gets lumped into the same category as someone looking for dirt on her personal life. It’s impossible to draw any sort of conclusion about what this means.
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I’m one of those folks who believes that creating local vertical blogs makes a lot of sense. If you’re a station who has covered Barack Obama for years, why not create a vertical blog with a separate URL rather than rolling the blog into your main news site?

Chicago’s Fox news has done just that, with the blog Obamatracker.com. The blog promises to be a “one stop for all you need to know if you are tracking Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign.”

It’s a nice idea, but it’s definately a web 1.0 presentation. While I think it’s a great idea not to obviously point back to the main Fox Chicago web site, the blog would be improved with a better template and a place to out at least some generic house ads–even just some Google Adsense ads.
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