Apps, Backpacks Feed Omaha's Digital Boom

The first follows the lines of the old fable. While many DMAs are feeling the chill of near recession, the burst of the housing bubble and the lean days of rising unemployment, Omahans are ready for winter. The city is home to five Fortune 500 companies — Berkshire Hathaway, ConAgra Foods, Union Pacific Corp., Peter Kiewit & Sons Inc. and Mutual of Omaha — and Omaha’s unemployment rate crouches just over 4% with a strong credit rating for the municipality.

he announced his plans to buy the employee-owned daily newspaper The Omaha World-Herald

The moral: Omaha is taking digital seriously, and while it may not be at the vanguard, it is industriously assimilating digital across its news landscape from breaking news to social media, weather to hallowed Huskers football.

But first, the backpacks. The TVU technology-powered backpack units were rolled out by WOWT-TV, a Gray-owned NBC affiliate, in March, according to Kristen South, emerging media manager at the station. “It’s a one-man band, basically,” South said of the units, which allow reporters to go live easily and nimbly on air and on the Web.

With four units in its newsroom, WOWT was a kind of test case for Gray, and the backpacks soon became a hit with viewers, especially in the late spring throes of Omaha’s tornado season. That’s when meteorologist Jim Flowers jumped into the passenger seat of a car accompanied by a driver and backpack cameraman shooting from the back seat, the three tearing into the heart of an unfurling storm.

“It was something that no one had ever seen before,” South said, “to have your meteorologist rolling through the hail and the wind and be able to talk about it and watch it live.”

For WOWT, whose news site pulls down a second-place 28.5% share of the digital market according to data from The Media Audit (and is one of only two local sites to show up on comScore’s radar at 220,000 unique visitors in October), the backpacks have been a traffic boon and are readily put to work on breaking stories and weather events. And when reporters aren’t sending out stories from their backpacks, others have been emailing in breaking news from their smartphones, which is often immediately flipped over on to the website, South said.

If local journalists are increasingly using their smartphones to break the news, many Omahans are also using theirs to take it. WOWT has a news app for iPad, iPhone and Android, one of many in a rapidly proliferating market. They’re joined by Hearst-owned KETV, the local ABC affiliate, whose news app may soon find company in some weather-specific apps according to Rick Adams, digital executive producer at the station.

Meanwhile, Omaha.com, the website for the World-Herald (and comScore’s unique visitor leader in the market at 368,000 in October), is barnstorming the space with 10 of its own apps, including apps for news, weather, classified, real estate, garage sales and one called BigRedToday, dedicated to all things Huskers (who actually hail from the University of Nebraska in neighboring DMA Lincoln, though the red bleeds statewide).

“The app space is an important part of our future, so we’re continuing to push hard into it,” said Jeff Carney, corporate director for digital development at the World-Herald. And having just launched a hybrid app for the iPad, Carney said the mobile future is growing even further. “We know tablet publishing is going to be crucial for us as we go forward.”

All of which points to a DMA edging close to 1.1 million people where digital has become a very serious business. “We expect that digital, including mobile and our tablet apps that will be making their debut next year, to double and then treble and then get larger and larger,” said Berkes Young, sales manager for KETV, which leads the digital market with a 31.7% share, according to The Media Audit.

According to data from media consultants Borrell Associates, median household income in Omaha is $50,703. Broadband penetration is 76% in the market, which stretches from southeastern Nebraska into western Iowa, including nearby Council Bluffs. And Borrell predicts local online ad spending to take an enormous leap from 2011, where it comes in at an estimated $81 million, to $154.3 million in 2016, a 90.5% jump.

In that climate, Young said media outlets aren’t just fooling around in the digital space. “We’ve got a pretty aggressive group of competitors here in Omaha,” he said. “It’s our job to make sure it’s not a loss leader. We are all expected to make money.”

That might explain the hotly competitive local deals game, where Groupon and Daily Social are joined by KETV’s weekly 7CanHelpYouSave, Omaha.com’s DailyDealOmaha and GoodDealOmaha, which is run by The Reader, the local alt-weekly.