Little Columbia Is Big On Experimentation

Columbia-Jefferson City, Mo., is a small media market, true, but it’s also home to one of the nation’s most respected journalism schools. So it should come as no surprise that experimentation plays a big role here.

The most popular newspaper Web site, the Columbia Daily Tribune's ColumbiaTribune.com, jumped on the pay-for-access bandwagon in December. It’s also busy using Knight Foundation grant money to develop open software designed to let users zero in on news and photos mapped to their own neighborhood.

Meanwhile, over at the University of Missouri, the Missouri School of Journalism’s students and faculty have turned the tables at the community newspaper they publish -- The Columbia Missourian -- making the print version secondary to ColumbiaMissourian.com. Now, the paper isn’t even discussed at the afternoon budget meeting and those in charge of putting it out have been pushed into a corner, said Tom Warhover, executive editor at the Missourian and an associate J-school professor. “It’s a quite attractive corner. But it’s a corner,” he said.

While the Tribune site has begun charging users, the Missourian has added a vendor called Kachingle that tries to coax people into establishing a small kitty from which to donate a few bucks each month to favored sites.

In addition, a “top-secret redesign” will be unveiled this fall, Warhover said. It will feature bubbles of related, clickable content that will pop up around stories, he said. “The best we can figure, nobody else in the world is doing it,” Warhover said. The redesigned site also will gather information on user preferences so it can show people more of the things they like, he said.

And the innovation doesn’t stop with the newspaper sites. KOMU.com, the market’s leading TV Web site, according to numbers from The Media Audit in Houston, got a new content management system in April and changed the way it presents the news. Instead of a traditional newspaper-like layout that highlights the most important news, KOMU now operates more like a blog, with the newest content posted at the top of the home page. Search engines, news director Stacey Woelfel pointed out, like blogs.

As if this weren’t enough for a market of 450,000 people -- ranked 134^th in population and Nielsen’s No. 137 market -- the San Francisco startup site, Newsy, moved here and employs many of the journalism school’s students. Newsy surveys the big stories from media around the world, then creates its own video stories distilling the coverage.

Most of Newsy’s traffic is mobile, said Jim Flink, vice president of news operations, and the format works especially well on tablets, he said. “It’s like carrying a mini television with you wherever you go.”

Of course, Newsy isn’t really a local news site. No. 1 among the true locals is ColumbiaTribune.com, according to The Media Audit. It attracts almost 29% of local adults in a 30-day period, the Audit said.

KOMU.com comes in a close second, at just under 28%, based on the Audit’s numbers. A newspaper is in a virtual tie with a TV site for third: NewsTribune.com, Web site for the News Tribune newspaper in nearby Jefferson City, and KMIZ.com each scored about 24% penetration in the Audit’s fall survey.

Local advertisers spent just over $204 million here last year, according to media consultants Borrell Associates Inc. About 11% of that went for online advertising. While the local total is expected to rise 27%, to $259 million by 2015, the online portion will jump 80%, to $41 million, Borrell predicts.

The Columbia Daily Tribune’s switch to a metered paywall, requiring users to pay after the first 10 stories viewed each month, has gone better than expected, said Andy Waters, general manager at the family-owned newspaper and publishing company.

Monthly page views have dropped from the 4-to-5 million range to around 3 million, he said. But monthly unique visitors have held steady at about 450,000 and, “We haven’t lost any advertising revenue -- none,” he said.

The lost page views, he explained, represented excess space, offered at a steep discount to national ad networks. “This space was really meaningless to us. We could lose up to 60% of our page views and still be able to serve all our local advertisers.”

The news that users would have to pay $8-a-month or $99-a-year ($1-a-month for print subscribers) was greeted by mostly negative comments on the site, Waters said.

Many of the site’s regular voices disappeared as becoming a subscriber became a requirement for commenting, he said.  

But that’s “not necessarily a bad thing,” he added. “They were just inflammatory a lot of times. The biggest comments I’ve had is people thanking me for cleaning up our comments.”

And more people have subscribed than expected -- 8,200, he said, although he refused to break down how many were print versus Web-only subscribers.