St. Louis Late To Storm Into Digtal Media

Over 3 million people live in St. Louis, but if you really want to understand what makes this city tick, you have to think small.

“One of the questions that people ask St. Louisans all the time is where did you go to high school,” said Bob Rose, deputy managing editor of the city’s daily paper, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and its Web site STLToday.com. “When we are talking to each other, we’re really collection of a bunch of different communities that each has an ID, and the IDs are based through our schools.

“Because of those school connections, we’re just a web of connectivity. Everybody knows everybody here.”

The most effective digital news players in St. Louis have figured out how to weave themselves into that web, one comprised of users who epitomize a humble, conservative Midwest sensibility, worship at the altar of the Cardinals and leave plenty of love in their hearts for high school prep sports. They’ve also got a fervent interest in weather, especially since a spring tornado cut a violent path straight through the city’s Lambert Field airport, doing extensive damage.

“Our site numbers went through the roof for the pictures and videos” said Rebecca Rahm, director of operations and programming for KSDK.com, which leads the market with a 30.3% share of monthly traffic according to The Media Audit. Rahm said the site averages 2 million unique visitors a month with weather, along with breaking news, being the most highly trafficked areas of the site.

The April tornado immediately became both a news and weather story for St. Louisans, who are typically unaccustomed to tornadic activity and being the center of attention. For the city’s network affiliate sites, it was a chance to engage with worried users more deeply.

“We were responding to users in real time and posting a lot of updates,” said Bryce Moore, the Webmaster for KMOV, the market’s Belo-owned CBS affiliate. “Our social media presence is really strong during storms.”

In a market that hasn’t exactly been on the cutting edge of digital, the tornado proved to be something of a watershed event in driving users to find news on online platforms. “It’s a conservative market,” Moore said. “No one does anything too crazy here or strays too far out of the box.”

The tornado may have made that box a little bigger, however, with all of the city’s affiliate sites reporting spikes in online and mobile traffic during and after the storm, particularly to the weather apps that have become a necessary tool in the market.

Not that St. Louisans have been exactly resistant to digital news prior to that. Jeff Winget, the director of marketing and promotions for KSDK, said that users love interacting with the “I’m Just Saying” section of KSDK.com where they can respond to on air commentaries. “We’re not just talking at people,” he said. “Hopefully we’re talking with people.”

Interactivity is also a push for the Lee Enterprises-owned STLToday.com, which averages four million unique visitors a month according to Omniture analytics but pulls in a second place 28.5% share according to Media Audit data. Rose said the site currently has about 17,000 Facebook fans, putting it into the nation’s top 20 of newspaper fan followings. It also integrates a Twitter feed into its home page on bigger stories.

To tap even more into conversing with its readers, the Post-Dispatch draws regularly on one of the city’s greatest passions: MLB’s Cardinals. In addition to a daily Cardinals newsletter that pushes content out, sportswriters Bernie Miklasz, Derrick Goold and Joe Strauss also hold regular live chats with readers. “They’re making really good use of social media to promote their work,” Rose said, “and they do a lot of cross-promoting of not only their stories but other stories from our paper.”

Negotiating the line between free and paid content is itself an experiment, Rose said. While not yet ready to raise a paywall around the site, “we’re looking at options of how we can get people to pay for our content,” he said. “Right now we’re just trying to build audience across all the platforms to get people used to the idea of finding our news on whatever platform they want.”

The tablet is one platform STLToday.com is targeting particularly, working toward the strategy of a daily PM update that focuses on deeper reads such as enterprise stories, features and columns, Rose said.

With a newsroom of about 180 reporters at its disposal, STLToday.com brings more journalistic resources to the game than any other St. Louis player. They are also able to draw on reporters from other Lee-owned suburban journals from which the site compiles approximately 40 hyperlocal pages. And given St. Louis’ small town feel, hyperlocal is something you have to get right to get loyal traffic, Rose said.