Could WHYY Redefine Public Media's Role?

Public media outlets are facing their steepest challenges in decades, with federal and state funding threatened or slashed and per-member donations crimped by a slow-growing economy. In spite of these headwinds, WHYY-FM-TV has been pursuing an ambitous digital strategy designed to secure its place in a changing media world.

In the works for nearly a decade, the initiative kicked off publicly in November with the launch of NewsWorks.org, an amalgam of hyperlocal news, community partnerships and top shelf civic and cultural reporting, all blanketed in layers of calls for user engagement. On May 16, the company followed up with NewsWorks Tonight, a half-hour local newscast that airs weeknights on WHYY-FM at 6 p.m. and boosts the radio outlet’s promotional push behind the Web effort.

William Marrazzo, WHYY’s president and CEO, says NewsWorks is a vehicle for numerous public media ambitions, but above all, it’s a clarion call for civic engagement. And he’s pumping in ample resources to make the call heard: $1.1 million a year from WHYY annually.

With 210,000 visitors per month and a growth rate of about 20% per month, NewsWorks.org has a long way to go to match Philadelphia’s online leader, Philly.com, which attracts 7 million monthly users. The site generated about 45% of WHYY’s $100,000 online revenue during the company’s 2011 fiscal year, with the rest coming from WHYY.org.

In an interview with NetNewsCheck.com’s Michael Depp, Marrazzo explains how NewsWorks evolved into its current form, how it’s experimenting with new membership schemes to engage a younger demographic and how the Web platform navigates the tricky space between synergy and cannibalism within WHYY.

An edited transcript:

What are the stakes for WHYY in this endeavor?

There are three. The first is to cut our teeth on hyperlocal portals. We’re testing on the site currently about a half a dozen ZIP codes representing different socioeconomic communities to see how we can best offer news content that adds unique value to their neighborhoods.

No. 2 is to use NewsWorks as a device for broadening the multimedia newsmaking skills for all of our journalists. We’re a dual licensee media company with a very mature radio and TV business and a pretty decent Web presence, but in a mature business of the sort that we’ve been lucky enough to run here for the last 45-50 years, culturally it’s hard to get a radio journalist to do stuff on TV and vice versa, let alone on the Web. So NewsWorks is an organizing device, not just a Web-based content device, for creating new multimedia news filing behavior among all our journalists.

The third is to capture and captivate what is a growing younger audience within our radio business line. Our radio business line has been growing anywhere from 8-11% a year in terms of overall market share. One of the slices of the growth profile is from listeners under the age of 34 who have a predisposition for consuming news online. So NewsWorks is a product line designed as well to fill their needs.

NewsWorks had a relatively long development period at WHYY -- according to one source dating back to 2006 in early incarnations. How difficult was it to transition from a legacy broadcast way of thinking to Web platform that was just as relevant?

I would pre-date that journey before 2006. I’d go all the way back to probably 2000, when we started thinking about the market pressures that we were beginning to see back then on our linear broadcast systems. And it was pretty clear back then that we needed to change up our game in order to remain a relevant public media resource in this market.

The critical pathway from that point forward was less about resources, although ultimately by 2006, financial resources became a choke point. But the real choke point from 2000 on was cultural, internal, a resistance to try new platforms to tell stories, to post news, to publish information that would deepen people’s engagement in their own community.

Another important dimension to what has since become NewsWorks but what was core to our business strategy back in 2000 was to differentiate at least this public media company with a huge dose of civic engagement. Stated another way, we were working back in 2000 figuring how to open up WHYY to our community in ways that we could hear more clearly what their wants and needs were, and they, with a certain amount of support from us, could help publish news and information that was relevant to their neighborhoods.

So from 2000 on, we started in earnest a process to reinvent this company around the notion of multimedia journalism and opening up the enterprise quite dramatically for input from our community. By 2006, that was actually working quite well. We had reached a point where we not only had all of the business systems in place -- new accounting systems, multimedia systems, new job descriptions to describe what a journalist might do on TV, radio, on the Web and in the community -- all of that back of the house stuff was in place. What then became the critical choke point was operating cash flow.