In Austin, Upstart Battles Texas-Sized Leader

Austin is home to one of the most respected members of a small but growing club of non-profit local news sites springing up around the country.

While the reach of the Austin American-Statesman’s two offerings here -- Austin360.com and Statesman.com -- is far greater, media observers say it is the upstart Texastribune.org that is creating the buzz.

This is, after all, a town full of political junkies (the Texas Capitol looms over downtown), and The Texas Tribune has chosen state government, politics and public affairs as its only focus. Even with a small editorial staff of 15 to 20, it manages to send 13 reporters to the Statehouse, according to managing editor Ross Ramsey.

The University of Texas system’s flagship campus is here, and the hills around Austin is where Michael Dell chose to base his computer company. The area is sometimes called the “Silicon Hills” -- a nod to another tech-savvy neighborhood farther West. So, there are plenty of techies to be impressed by the Tribune’s innovations.

“What they’re doing with interactive images and databases -- the mainstream media are not keeping up with that,” said George Sylvie, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Communications. “During the election, there were some maps that would just blow your mind,” he said.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation just awarded the Tribune and fellow non-profit The Bay Citizen a $975,000 grant to co-develop an open source platform to help jumpstart other fledgling Web sites. It is expected to be ready later this year, said Niran Babalola, the Tribune’s director of technology.

Another grant, this one from the Open Society Foundations, allowed The Texas Tribune to build a searchable database of transcripts from Texas legislative sessions, Ramsey said. A transcript of the March 23 senate session, he noted, runs 140,000 words long. “I don’t know that anybody will read it,” Ramsey said. “I think they’ll use it for research.”

The New York Times has a deal to buy Texas news content from the Tribune twice a week, Ramsey said, providing some of the $8 million raised so far from contributions, grants and corporate sponsorships to keep the site afloat.

All this is happening in a media market with 1.8 million people, and an estimated $528.7 million in local ad dollars spent to reach them last year, according to Borrell Associates, a media research and consulting firm.

Borrell predicts that by 2015, there will be $690.8 million local ad dollars being spent here. Online spending will then account for $127.4 million of the local total, up from $70.4 million in 2010, Borrell said. A healthy 76.5% of those in this market have Internet access, according to Borrell.

Of adults heading to the Web, about 30% visited the newspaper’s site, Statesman.com, during a 30-day period, according to The Media Audit, based in Houston. And about 25% checked out the paper’s mainly-entertainment site, Austin360.com, according to the Audit, giving the paper the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked sites in the market.

Coming in at 20% to 21% for exposure were the market’s major TV Web sites, KVUE.com (the ABC affiliate), KXAN.com (NBC) and News8Austin.com/YNN.com (Time Warner Cable), according to the Audit. Several radio Web sites registered below 6%, the Audit noted.

Babalola said the Tribune’s databases have been a hit. One that reveals government employees’ salaries is the most popular feature on the site, accounting for almost half its 2.7 million page views in February, according to Babalola. (There were 350,000 unique visitors during the month, he said.)

That’s a big jump from the 150,000 unique visitors and 600,000 page views Babalola cited for February, 2010.

Still, the Tribune’s numbers are dwarfed by the more than 18 million monthly page views an editor at the Austin American-Statesman claimed for Statesman.com and the more than 8 million he said were garnered by Austin360.com in February.

The Statesman site had more than 2 million unique visitors that same month, with Austin360 coming in at a bit under 500,000, he said.

The newspaper-like Statesman.com site saw double-digit growth in page views and visits between 2009 and 2010, according to Zach Ryall, online managing editor at the newspaper. Austin360’s numbers increased more slowly, he said.

Mobile traffic was a big winner, registering triple-digit growth, Ryall said. The iPhone alone generates around 80,000 mobile views per day, Statesman editor Fred Zipp said.

Verve Wireless Inc. created the paper’s smartphone sites, working on a fee-based/revenue sharing basis, Ryall said.

The Statesman has an iPhone app and expects to have one for iPad soon, complements of its owner, Cox Media Group, Ryall said.

While Ryall said there are “no immediate plans” to erect a paywall at the paper, he added that Cox is in the process of standardizing platforms across all its newspaper, TV and radio properties, which would make such a shift easier. Cox is using and customizing Ellington’s open source content management system as part of the process, Zipp said.