Jackson Online Media Scores With Football

Jackson’s digital media players are tapping into the local communities’ football frenzy, driving traffic to their Web sites and mobile apps through extensive and varied local football coverage. 

Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger -- one of the few local newspapers in the country circulating statewide -- has staked its position as the place to go for news and information on local high school and college football games.

Friday night football “is the franchise that we own here because of the amount of effort that goes in to that,” said Earnest Hart, assistant managing editor for online with the Gannett-owned Clarion-Ledger, the only major daily newspaper in the market and the No. 2 local Web site in the market in July, according to comScore. The Clarion-Ledger has assembled a team of about 12 part-time workers who gather stats and crunch numbers Friday evening for the site. They’re in constant contact with coaches and team representatives to gather the details on the play-by-play and get them up on the site and in the paper right away.

“We’re real proud of our high school sports,” Hart said.  The Clarion-Ledger’s site allows users to search their database for football game results of local teams. It also engages its audience by featuring community-submitted photos of the local games, star boy and girl players of the week, and a weekly rundown of high school “top performers.” 

The paper had 81,000 unique visitors in July according to comScore -- a virtual dead heat with Raycom Media-owned WLBT-TV’s site, which had 82,000 unique visitors. Hearst’s WAPT-TV was next with 58,000 unique visitors, followed by Media General’s WJTV with 39,000. ComScore did not have data on Jackson Broadcasting’s WDBD.

ABC affiliate WAPT and Fox affiliate WDBD both have weekly half-hour high school football shows recapping the week’s games, which are in turn then featured on their Web sites.

Marc Jaromin, president of WDBD, said the station strives to capture the highlights of the entire local football “event” to share with both TV and online viewers. “It’s not just [the game] highlights, it’s the cheerleaders, the moms, the concession stands, the bands,” he said. “We try and capture the event, the excitement.”

WLBT, the market’s leading TV site, attracts consumers to its site with its “Friday Nite Lites” video recap. “There are so many outlets for pro and college sports,” said station president Dan Modisett, adding of high school sports and smaller local colleges, “That’s our sweet spot.”

Beyond football, the local TV stations are also looking for new and different ways

to tap in to a growing local TV audience including sophisticated new mobile apps and community-specific coverage online. While many markets across the country are seeing a declining local TV news audience, Jackson’s audience is expanding. The market ranks 90 by Nielsen.

“There’s a good meat and potatoes hunger for news in our viewership,” WAPT president and general manager Stuart Kellogg said. Kellogg said the market’s local TV audience is up 7% since 2005. “We play bigger than a 90 market,” he said.

Jackson, the Mississippi capital, is a city of contrasts. The Jackson DMA has 921,660 households, and the median household income in the Jackson DMA is $38,960 -- that’s compared to a national median household income of $53,492, according to Borrell Associates. Twenty-nine percent of the market does not have a home Internet connection, while 64% have broadband and 7% have a dial-up connection. 

Local online ad spending is estimated to total $50.1 million this year, climbing 46.2% to $73.2 million by 2016, according to Borrell. And the mobile phone market is booming with almost 100% penetration in the market, said WAPT’s Kellogg. 

The local media outlets are trying to tap in to the local community spirit through more than just football coverage, providing options for online viewers to customize their local news. 

WLBT’s “Your Community News” provides a way to customize the local news viewed online. The station has a dedicated reporter assigned to assembling news from 15 distinct Jackson-area communities, putting stories online that wouldn’t necessarily have made it on-air. General manager Dan Modisett said he suspects they cover 80%-85% of the DMA through the “Your Community News” effort. The station also solicits video from area residents. 

“We made a lot of contacts with everything from cities to chambers of commerce, schools, local community groups and people that live in communities,” Modisett said, all of whom send stories to the station, he said.

WDBD has seen tremendous growth in its site in large part due to the launch of an “old-school” style morning show that launched in January, station president Marc Jaromin said. Six weeks after the 7-9 a.m. show launched, the station saw its Web traffic climb from 27,000 unique visitors to 94,000 in six weeks, he said. The show features interviews with local doctors, businessmen and other locals of note, then it gets those online within an hour of the show’s ending, he said.