Local News Lost In Digital Translation

Traditional media are failing on numerous fronts, Milkman said, ranging from the metrics they’re using to measure success to their inability to fully capitalize on key “images,” such as breaking news or weather, that distinguish their brand on its legacy platform. Most local news sites, he added, are serving merely as utility extensions of the brand rather than entertaining and engaging platforms in their own right.

Milkman conducted a series of focus groups and in-depth interviews in Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., for the study, which looked closely at how each market’s digital leaders -- Philly.com, Washingtonpost.com and WRAL.com, respectively -- played with and against their legacy brand identity. He concluded that each site invariably operated under the shadow of that identity, which can be a boon and a liability.

In an interview with NetNewsCheck, Milkman discussed the advantages and disadvantages of staying tightly aligned with the legacy platform online, the difficulty of translating popular on-air talent into consistent online drivers and the essential need to build a site from the perspective of consumer needs first.

An edited transcript:

Your study firmly emphasizes that page views are not a measure of digital success and that digital media need to focus instead on image and brand development. What do you think those page view numbers should tell us, if anything?

There’s some indication of activity. There are a lot of things that you can do to generate click-throughs or activity that don’t ultimately satisfy the consumer or build the image that you want to build for your company.

An analogy might be early on rock stations on their Web sites would put pictures of girls in bikinis that you could page through one after another, and that generated large numbers of page views, but didn’t really develop the rock image of that radio station. Our fear in this space is that we’re throwing everything and the kitchen sink up there, and then our only measure of whether it’s working is the page view statistic that we’re seeing.

Your study cites Philly.com as an online success in its market in part because of its dramatically distinct brand identity from the Inquirer, which provides the site with much of its content. Why is this brand distinction so important for users?

From the very beginning, you’re not locked into any of the images of the existing brand. In every market we saw some fade in the overall popularity of the newspapers. So by choosing that brand and being under the shadow of that image, by nature you’re going to position yourself as old, slow, long form, long winded and maybe not custom crafted to the needs and interests of somebody when they’re online.

So can the legacy brand platform be a kind of albatross?

To some extent, absolutely. On the other side of the equation, a lot of credibility comes with the parent name and a lot of value comes along with that, so there’s a lot of homework that you don’t have to do in terms of building the idea. On the other hand, it is limiting, and I think what consumers are telling us is that when they come to the new media in some ways they’re looking for a new form and a new package for it.

In Philly.com’s case, is the domain name a significant factor?

I think that’s right. They picked a very big, broad name, so if you search anything about Philadelphia you’re going to find Philly.com. Strategically, that was a very smart move. It is a little bit generic from a brand perspective and it doesn’t tell you much more about what it is, but certainly at this stage in its evolution it’s quite an asset.

The study also points to the enormous success that Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV has had with viewers on its broadcast platform, success that stems from the close personal relationships many viewers have with the anchors and reporters. But you also say that the success hasn’t translated online, and this is true of a number of stations that enjoy strong multigenerational relationships that don’t carry over to digital. So how can it be done? Can a station effectively translate that loyalty online?

If you look under the hood of channel 6 in Philadelphia or some of the others, you see pretty quickly that it is that personality relationship that is one of the foundational pieces of its brand. But could you build a personality angle online, which nobody has really seriously pursued yet? You’re beginning to see some of it, but would anybody be brazen enough to create personalities that are Web-only -- designed for and friendlier to the computer screen?

We did feel some resistance to a lot of video production online. A lot of the consumers we talked to were using this product at work on their desk and they did not want to come off at work like they were watching videos. But something in terms of the production that creates more of a sense of a bond may be a piece of the puzzle. And the other thing would be owning those images that were so important on the television -- whether that be weather or traffic or some other image -- that may help them as television stations to transition the audience better.