Rethinking TV Station News Sites

According to new media expert Steve Safran, the best way for stations to keep local TV news viewers is to send them away—on line.

Safran, Audience Research & Development's senior VP/Media 2.0, made the statement at a Wednesday Promax/BDA conference session in New York, "Leading Innovation, Reinvention and Opportunity in Local News."

He began with the bad news first. While online revenues for "pure play" sites had hit 57 percent, local TV online dollars are barely 7 percent of the pie. "These are terrible numbers," he added, "but worse yet, your networks are going around you so your ratings are diving. Viewers can now get the premiere of The Office on Apple or Hulu or from HD streaming."

The solution, he said, is for stations to create their own separate online company, building a separate site that doesn't even have the station brand on all its sub-sites but is always searchable and sharable.

"The goal is not to use this Web site to drive visitors to watch your local TV newscast," Safran explained. "TVwebsites are now their own business, with their own sales staff."

In this new world, local online newscasts must take blog-style formats, allowing sales to be made by daypart, with news staffs filing stories constantly, and with the lead story always the most recent story (not always the most serious news story of the day.)

And don't load up those news sites with promos for your broadcast news. "Don't do this," Safran begged, "because it just annoys the visitor. And forget about tallying page views. "Page views are a terrible metric," he added. "Who views is much more important."

Safran recommends that TV stations create their own content managing systems so it owns all the cookie data, all the viewership data, all the ad revenue.

And what will keep those separate and unique online news viewers coming back is to send them away, by adding lots of additional links on your TV news Web site that moves people away from your site to other areas of interest to them, even if it means sending them (gasp) to the competition.

"Trust is the killer app on the Web," Safran proclaimed. "If people know you are sending them to sites they want, they will return again and again back to you."

Under the banner of "DO THIS NOW," Safran urges: Niche sites, cross-branding, RSS/social nets/even Facebook-type pages and constant brand assessment.

TV stations, he said, need to ask of their Web site: What is its mission? How does it fit or not fit with our newscast?