Denver's KUSA Leads Thriving Online Scene

If the 2009 shuttering of the Rocky Mountain News left a void in Denver’s media market, it is difficult to find the hole today. Though, as University of Colorado journalism instructor Paul Daugherty said, “It’s hard when a state icon goes the way of the dodo,” this old mining town offers digital gold to prospectors digging for news on the Internet.

The most popular Web sites belong to NBC affiliate KUSA and the city’s surviving daily newspaper, The Denver Post. But smaller outlets, too -- including several nonprofit efforts -- have built loyal audiences and helped preserve the region’s journalistic richness since the Rocky’s collapse.

KUSA’s 9News.com is Denver’s digital market leader; more than a third of respondents to a recent Media Audit survey reported visiting the site in the past month. The considerable figure suggests 9News.com is an information authority in the city, but digital content Manager Misty Montano attributes the site’s success to its rejection of sage status.

“It’s really about engagement with our audience,” Montano said. “We’re not the authority. We acknowledge that viewers have voices, and we want to hear them and answer their questions.

“We can no longer be the king of the mountain shouting down.”

Take the weather map featured prominently on 9News.com’s homepage: In a traditional broadcast format -- king-of-the-mountain style, in Montano’s words -- a station meteorologist uses the map to deliver a weather report to viewers, based on the information she deems most important. But in an engaging format, the map is an interactive tool site visitors can use to collect the information they consider most important. They can zoom to street level, activate various radars, and track severe weather ranging from wildfires to earthquakes, tailoring the map to their needs.

9News.com even offers a mobile weather application, in addition to its news app.

The station’s digital weather coverage is just one manifestation of an overarching mission: not to duplicate online what KUSA does on TV.

It’s a goal shared by TheDenverChannel.com, the Web site of ABC affiliate KMGH, which ranked fourth in the Media Audit survey and was named best Web site by the Colorado Associated Press in 2008 and 2009. The site also won the 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award for best regional Web site. Kim Ngan Nguyen, TheDenverChannel.com’s managing Web editor who helped launch the site a decade ago, said television stations’ sites have evolved from copycats to innovators.

In an interview, Nguyen recalled a conversation she had more than 10 years ago with a colleague at KCBS in Los Angeles, where she worked as the managing editor of Channel2000.com.

“We were just putting our TV stuff online,” Nguyen said, “and I remember my news director saying, ‘We’re never going to promote the Web site on TV. Why would we want to compete with ourselves?’”

The answer, in Nguyen’s estimation, is that a station wouldn’t want to compete with itself. So, TheDenverChannel.com maintains its own staff, which produces and posts content that doesn’t fit or doesn’t work in a newscast.

“What we’ve learned is the Web audience is completely different from the TV audience,” Nguyen explained. “Sometimes a quirky story that doesn’t belong in a newscast does great online.”

TheDenverChannel.com uses a real-time analytics service called chartbeat to track its news items and identify the ones generating reader interest. It’s a useful tool, Nguyen said, though she noted the site does not direct its journalistic resources according to popularity alone.

“Sometimes, we say, ‘This story is really important and should be the lead, but it’s not that interesting,’” Nguyen said. “It’s our job as journalists to make important stories interesting. We’re not going to not cover something because it’s boring.”

Also unafraid to tackle potentially boring stories is RMPBS.org, the Web site of the Rocky Mountain Public Broadcasting System. In addition to full-length episodes of RMPBS’s original TV shows, such as the public affairs program Colorado State of Mind, the site includes a page called RMPBS Reports, self-dubbed “a Colorado news consortium, featuring investigative, education, health and political coverage.”

The “consortium” relies heavily on a trio of RMPBS partners, The Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network, Education News Colorado and Health Policy Solutions.

The first is a nonprofit initiative that performs a laborious brand of reporting that many cash-strapped newsrooms struggle to sustain. Led by Executive Director Laura Frank, a former Rocky Mountain News reporter and 2007 Pulitzer Prize top-10 finalist, I-News delves into public records and other data to tell impactful multimedia stories.

I-News collaborates not only with RMPBS but also with many other Colorado news outlets, including The Denver Post and 9News.com. It is backed by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and others, but is not entirely reliant on benevolence.

“I learned the hard way not to put all your eggs in one basket,” Frank said. “So, I-News’ revenue is extremely diverse.”