EXPANDING TV'S LOCAL ADVANTAGES ON THE WEB

Shortly after Vincent Sadusky assumed command of the LIN Television group in 2006, he hired Robb Richter to push the TV station group more aggressively into online businesses.

The former ShopNBC online marketing executive has done just that. In addition to bolstering the group's 28 basic news-and-information Web sites, he has created political sites in all 17 of LIN’s markets and has begun to roll out local entertainment sites in markets like Austin, Texas, that are entertainment destinations.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY Editor Harry A. Jessell, Richter says there is more to come—some that he can talk about (local search sites) and some that he can’t (check back in a couple of months).

The bottom line for Richter and his online initiative is the top line. Within five years, he says, his Web business will account for 5 percent of LIN’s total revenue. Or at least that’s the goal.

An edited transcript:

What’s the LIN online strategy in a nutshell?

Our No. 1 and our No. 2 strengths are news and weather. We’ve got 28 station Web sites right now and were reinventing the wheel on those every day. Since I’ve been here we’ve relaunched them twice and we’re about to go through a relaunch again in the second quarter.

Our strategy is to get our house in order, get the basics working like they should, capitalize on the great traffic and then move on to being what I call the local information destination.

We want to extend our brand, we want to gain new viewers and users and we’ll do that in a number of ways, including the political microsite strategy that we launched in January and local entertainment sites.

How are the political sites doing?

Politic microsites are hyperlocal political services that we’ve launched in all 17 of our markets. Each is run by a station. Michiganpolitics.tv is the political site for the state of Michigan. It’s hosted by WOOD out of GrandRapids. Ripolitics.tv is hosted by our Providence, R.I., station [WPRI], Texaspolitics is hosted by our Austin station [KXAN].

When you go to any of these sites, in addition to candidate information about Clinton and Obama, you’re going to see all of your local candidates’ profiles and where you can vote. We’re adding commenting and polling functions to it in version 2.0 in the next 30 days. We’re working with AP so you can get a lot of their national polling and mapping information.

Our goal was to have a great Super Tuesday, which we did. It was just unbelievable the traffic we got and the interest we got on those sites. It was actually more than I had expected for sites that really had only been around for less than 30 days.

The sites would not get any traffic if we didn’t have all of our TV stations promoting them. No one’s going to know they exist if you don’t have your top TV stations in the market telling people to go there.

When you announced the political sites in January, you said you would seek broadcasters to run sites in other states. How is that going?

We’ve talked to a few broadcasters about just basically giving them the back end. We’ll probably be rolling out a couple of other political.tv web sites with other smaller broadcasters in their markets this spring.

This isn’t necessarily something we’re looking to make a ton of money off of as much as it’s a platform that we believe is really important. But it’s traffic that we can continue aggregating.

So you have the basic news sites and you have political sites. Are you looking at any other kinds of verticals?

We’ve got a lot of markets with great entertainment so we’ll be launching entertainment microsites in those markets this year.

In which markets?

Well, for instance, in Austin, Texas, you want to have an entertainment microsite. Unfortunately, it won’t be there by the time the South by Southwest Festival happens this spring, but it’s something we really believe makes a lot of sense.

I don’t want to cookie cutter everything across every market. We might have four or five markets where entertainment makes sense and we might have four or five markets that something else makes sense.

Like what?

We’re also planning a local search strategy. We believe that you can go to yellowpages.com and you can go to Google and you can go to Yahoo! and that’s fine, but they don’t have that hyperlocal content, they don’t have the relationships with the advertisers locally that we do.

I want our sites to be more than just a listing. I want them to have local content so that users get more than just a hyperlink to someone’s Web site. So, it’s not going to just be your run-of-the-mill search product. That’s why we want to really think through it. We have to really differentiate ourselves for it to be a realistic product that’s going to get traffic.

Is there anything else you’re plotting?

Until something’s done, I don’t like to be going public with it.

So you do have some other ideas?

Yes. There are things that are going to happen. Like I said, I can give you a little taste, entertainment, local search. Those are two that are definitely going to happen and the rest of them I just kind of want to keep close to my vest right now, not for any reason other than the fact that I just want them to be real before the rest of the world hears about them.

You use the WorldNow platform for most of the station Web sites.

Yes, we have six Fox stations built on the Fox Interactive platform and another 22 Web sites that are on the WorldNow platform.

Now, are you intending to maintain those?

For now. We’re in contracts with both of them.

And that’s not going to change anytime soon?

It’s not something that I’m working on anytime soon. Like I said, I’m more interested in trying to figure out, within their world, how not to be so templated. You know, Fox is doing a big re-architecture this year. WorldNow has been open to us going in and being a little bit more flexible and doing some development within its platform.

So, for instance, we’re working on launching a new video player in the second quarter. We’re going to put the design together on that video player, but it will link back into WorldNow’s back-end system. They’ve kind of opened up the tool box for us.

We just did a story in which all the broadcast Web service providers are talking about giving clients more flexibility and control.

Yes. I read it and the bottom line is they know that they have to serve a purpose. Five years ago, TV stations didn’t have the back end, the personnel or anything to do something like this so they served a purpose and a good purpose.

But in order for them to succeed and move on, they realize that they have to become more flexible and that this is now a very competitive field and everyone’s Web site can’t look like everyone else’s Web site.

By the way, every other broadcast company and newspaper company has someone like me in their organization now that has their own ideas. So that’s fueling a lot of this too. We’re saying, hey, we have all these ideas that we want to do in order to be the No. 1 media site.

A big trend over the last few years has been the broadcast networks moving their primetime programming on to the Web. Are you interested in being an outlet for that kind of material?

I’m interested in great content on my Web sites. We have Fox on demand on our Fox sites. We have the ABC video player on the ABC sites. The recent CBS deal was cut and so we host its video player.

Here’s my take on it: If someone’s coming to my site to check the weather, I want them to catch a great headline on a great story that we wrote, see the episode of 24 from last night and order a pizza on the way home that they saw on the local search.

My goal is to make sure our sites are jam-packed with a lot of different content. So the short answer is, yes. If the network has the ability to provide us with television shows that our viewers can watch while they’re on our sites, then I’m interested in it.

You talked about another relaunch of your basic news and information sites. What’s that all about?

It’s a cosmetic change, first. It’s a usability change, second. It’s obviously putting our content in a better light and providing tools that you might not be able to get at another local news site. That could be the video player, it could be widgets for your desktop, it could be a number of things.

It’s also making sure that our back end is in good shape so that we’ve got the best SEO and the best SEM from our sites. These are things that you just have to do because the Googles of the world have such an opportunity to send you traffic if you have properly set your sites up for them.

Is your primary competitor in all these markets the local paper?

I guess you could say that because on the one hand, they’re usually No. 1 and there are a couple of our markets where we do beat them, but the local newspaper and the other TV stations are definitely on our radar.

But I look at Google as a big competitor of mine. I look at Yahoo! as a big competitor of mine, especially as it tries getting into more local information and striking up syndication deals with folks. We have to make sure that we protect that ground.

How are the demands of your Web sites changing what the newsroom is doing?

That’s a big deal in our newsrooms, training them to think about the Internet as just another opportunity to tell their story. I don’t know many journalists who normally get 20 to 30 seconds of air time who wouldn’t want five minutes if you would or could let them have it.

We have dedicated content producers in all of our newsrooms, but reporters who are writing for broadcast have to change the stories a little bit because you write differently for the Internet.

Stories written for the teleprompter are all in caps and have all the little symbols the teleprompter reads. That doesn’t help you at all. You know, that would be one of the nice things—if you could figure out how to integrate [Avid] iNews back into your CMS for the Web.

The other game that is very important to me is the whole e-mail marketing game. So, we’re redoing our entire e-mail platform, our front end and our back end.

It’s another way to stay engaged with the viewer. It’s simplest form is sending out the top five headlines every morning, making sure that the weather report is in their e-mail box when they wake up in the morning.

These are the opt-in e-mail services that users sign up for when they visit the sites.

Yes. We want to really create that whole communication process that we can be working with our viewers and our users back and forth all day long. More important, you’re building a very, very strong database filled with a bunch of attributes about your users and your viewers. You can glean a lot of analytics and you can do a lot of research with it.

I asked Terry Mackin, when he was the digital guy at Hearst-Argyle, what keeps him up at night and he said the Web ratings. [Editor’s note: Mackin is now head of the Univision TV station group.]

Yes. That’s a great one. There are a lot of things that keep me up at night.

Well, give me the top three.

I would agree with Terry 100 percent on the ratings. There’s no consistency between Nielsen and comScore. But they’re working on that.

Then, there is generating revenue. That’s why we just hired a director of sales, Michael Kelly. There’s just so much training that needs to be done out there, internally and externally. The agencies still aren’t sure what to do with this. What the model is, how to buy it. We want to be an early adopter in helping them get there.

I guess the No. 1 thing that keeps me up is trying to make the perfect experience for our viewers. And you can’t do that unless you really understand the feedback and you’re getting the proper testing done. You can get caught in a mad circle, making changes just to make changes.

Anytime you make a change you run the chance of  losing people, too. So you’ve got to be sure that you make the change for the right reason, not because you just think it’s time to make a change.

Anything else I should be asking about you?

This is a young business. Everyone’s still, I think, getting their house in order. We think we’re doing it as well as anybody out there, but we’re also testing and learning and trying to figure out what the best mousetrap is.

At the same time, we’re just not going to give up on our local TV stations. They are the power behind all this and we believe that they are going to power us through this.

Everyone in our stations has done a great job kind of taking themselves into this because they understand it is a great opportunity, a grand brand extension to what we’re already doing.