KARE'S LATEST EXPERIMENT: ONLINE NEWS ADD-ON

Often in Market Share we bring you success stories about stand-alone local sales promotions—special events or program segments that deliver a nice chunk of change.

Ideally, these promotions bring incremental revenue from new advertisers who stick around and become long-term clients. But while bonus ad dollars are nice, but they ignore the larger challenge, namely how broadcasters can grow their core business in the face of ever-increasing competition and audience fragmentation.

Gannett’s KARE Minneapolis thinks it's found one way—by regularly expanding news coverage onto the station’s Web site. “We no longer call ourselves a television station,” says Cindy Chapman, KARE’s executive producer of integrated media. “We’re an ‘information center’—on air, online and on mobile.”

The information center concept was first articulated in November 2006 in a company-wide memo circulated by Gannett CEO Craig Dubow, which was picked up by Wired.

Within a few months, KARE had fully embraced the concept with KARE OnLive, a daily interactive newscast simulcast on air and online at 4 p.m. Initially, KARE OnLive split its focus between news story follow-up and special features for “stay-at home moms.”

The two-platform show generated loads of publicity, but ultimately failed to deliver sufficient viewers—or viewsers as Chapman like to call them—people “who watch the news but actively seek more information online and elsewhere.”

So, KARE changed course. It pulled the plug on KARE OnLive and transferred its interactive resources to support the newscast more directly. Chapman was reassigned from executive producer of KARE OnLive to her present job, which focuses on new ways to link traditional news features with new media opportunities.

And last Wednesday, Chapman’s team may have hit paydirt.

“We added an online streaming element to our Extra Investigation story on ‘prevailing wage’—a controversial law that requires higher-than-usual pay rates for all laborers on state construction projects.” Reporter-producer Rick Kupchella’s in-depth report revealed that Minnesota government construction costs many millions of dollars more than similar commercial projects. (View Kupchella’s story by clicking here.)

“It’s a great story but very complex,” says Chapman. “There is no way to answer every viewer question on the air, so we used our Web site to explain it further after the newscast.” Indeed, for 40 minutes after the 10 p.m. news, anchors Julie Nelson and Mike Pomeranz joined Kupchella to present a special follow-up Web show. (View the Web show by clicking here.)

Chapman’s team knew they were on to something when on air promos for Kupchella’s series generated dozens of phone calls prior to the broadcast—many (no doubt) from Minnesota labor unions. 

After the story aired, the audience was invited to go deeper into the topic online during the subsequent Web show.

At least 300 viewsers took advantage of that opportunity, reports Chapman, more than three times the number than might typically visit the “Extras” Web page after a newscast. Chapman considers this number “a very encouraging start” and expects it to rise as post-newscast Web shows become commonplace.

To manage “viewser” comments online, KARE’s Web site uses a system called Shoutmix, a downloadable widget which makes it easy to send live messages to the station.

The comments ranged from the insightful (“the state is using an arbitrary method for determining wages which … costs an extra hundred million dollars per year.”) to the merely cranky (“Unions didn't bring you George Bush!”).

Participant comments show up directly on the Web site, although they’re automatically filtered to prevent the display of common profanity. A human monitor can then delete other types of offensive comments and, if need be, banish an abusive visitor.

This first-time late news Web show was an experiment. But long-term, it will take regularly-schedule Web shows and a significant audience to create significant station revenue—something Sales Director David Crawford expects to happen.

“Every advertiser has goals and objectives [that often match with] special news features,” Crawford says.

“They’re hungry for any new kind of platform we can bring them that connects them with customers.” Crawford’s team is already working with Crawford to develop local sales opportunities tied to NBC’s broadcast and online coverage of this summer’s Olympics.

As liaison between the newsroom and the marketing department, Chapman knows these efforts may take years to fully pay off. “We learned a lot doing KARE OnLive, but you’ve got to keep trying new things, even if it takes nine failures to find one success. And at KARE we’re allowed to take risks.”

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