Sacramento Sounds Its Digital Voice

And yet for a state capital still nursing some very visible cuts and bruises from the recession, Sacramento shows signs of a thriving and highly connected digital news market, one in which network affiliate sites are locked in a pitched battle for a greater share of Facebook “likes,” user generated content flourishes and the daily newspaper has consolidated a growing army of bloggers to leverage against a depleted newsroom.

That effort, Sacramento Connect, is the centerpiece initiative on SacBee.com, the digital arm of the McClatchy-owned Sacramento Bee. With a 29.5% share of local digital traffic, according to data from the Houston-based The Media Audit, SacBee.com is the market’s leader, and its blog network may have a large role in that supremacy.

Launched in 2010, Sacramento Connect was about as organically grown a product as the digital news market is wont to find according to Tom Negrete, managing editor of SacBee.com and the Bee. It all began with the integration of the Bee’s tech workers into its newsroom about four years ago, he said, when daily interactions with the journalists began to yield some fresh ideas.

“We decided to just embrace the fragmentation that was going on in the market,” Negrete said. Orchestrated under the direction of a community manager, Sacramento Connect currently has 156 contributing community bloggers with another 116 waiting to be added to the network. “There’s probably another 100 that we hope to have added by the end of the year,” Negrete said.

The blogs tend to break down by subject matter like food and gardening rather than along hyperlocal lines, he said, noting that bloggers need to meet some core quality criteria from the Bee before they’re folded into the network. But Sacramento Connect soon evolved beyond the initial purpose of wrapping its arms -- and brand -- around digital Balkanization in the market.

“Now we’re looking at it as a content source for us,” Negrete said, “almost like a wire service.”

Negrete said that story tips now routinely come to the newsroom through Sacramento Connect and that its community manager is a regular presence in daily editorial meetings. “It’s like Santa Claus coming for the editors,” he said.

Blog posts also occasionally migrate into the paper and are sometimes linked to and promoted through stories generated by staff journalists, which has led to some bruised egos in the process. “It took a lot of understanding in the newsroom,” Negrete said of the 147 journalists, a staff nearly half the size of its 2005 strength.

SacBee.com also gets online traction through staff-written blogs including Capitol Alert, a San Francisco 49ers blog by popular writer Matt Barrows and The State Worker, which caters to the city’s 118,000 state employees. Each average between half a million and a million page views a month (SacBee.com gets an average 3.7 million unique visitors a month overall).

But one area in which the paper acknowledges lagging is social media, where its 6,000 Facebook “likes” pale in comparison to the local network affiliate sites. “It’s a bit of a Facebook battleground,” said Tim Geraghty, vice president and news director for News10.net, the Web site for Gannett-owned ABC affiliate KXTV. News10.net boasts 31,512 “likes” by comparison, according to a recent check, followed closely by Fox40.com, a Tribune site, at 31,143 and KCRA.com, a Hearst site, at 30,760.

Using a third party ShoutMix platform, News10.net also courts interactivity by sistering a news video window with a moderated chat board, letting viewers interact with breaking stories in real time. “We have increased the license for the number of users three times in the last year,” Geraghty said.

And News10.net is stepping into the market’s sparsely-populated hyperlocal space with a 32-site network called MyNeighborhood. Geraghty said such a hyperlocal push is valuable in a DMA with essentially five cities under its umbrella: Modesto, Stockton, Sacramento, Fairfield and Vallejo. “The challenge for all of us is making sure that all of our digital sites do a good job of finding content appropriate to those communities,” he said.

Not to be outdone, the site for NBC affiliate KCRA.com, a strong legacy brand in the market, is pushing user generated content as a means to widen its coverage through its ULocal platform. The site, which takes second place locally with a 20.4% share according to The Media Audit, averages about 1.5-2 million unique visitors a month, many of whom are drawn to its interactive features.

News director Anzio Williams cited a recent plastics factory fire that generated over 600 photos and videos from viewers. “We have eyeballs throughout the community,” he said.

KCRA also uses a sister site, Highschoolplaybook.com, to drive interactivity. Each week, the station lets users decide which high school football game will get the most coverage based on online voting. Users can also submit spirit-themed high school videos to win 1,000 vote blocks (SacBee.com, Fox40.com and News10.net are also competitive players in the high school sports game, each having ramped up local coverage efforts).