News Pureplay Aims High In Santa Barbara
One of the defectors was Bill Macfadyen, a 15-year veteran front page editor of the paper who went on to found and publish Noozhawk after a failed attempt at launching a new weekly in the market. “The whole reason that we started was there a void in mainstream, everyday local news, so that’s what we’re filling,” he said.
Public engagement-oriented reporting has been the issue for Noozhawk instead, and the Internet pureplay has been increasingly throwing its efforts into enterprise reporting projects such as a recently wrapped series on prescription drug abuse supported by a fellowship from University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.
“We wanted to use it as a statement to the community that Noozhawk is capable of doing something really ambitious and a signature project that nobody else can do here,” Macfadyen said, adding that he focuses his small full-time staff on such issues and lets community groups send in their own lighter news and announcements.
Supported almost entirely by display ads, Macfadyen said Noozhawk is less interested in widening its coverage and springing off verticals than it is digging deeper into Santa Barbara’s civic landscape, particularly its booming nonprofit scene.
From a hawk’s eye view, Macfadyen pointed out some of the site’s key features.
Launched: October 2007
Updates: Seven days
Monthly unique visitors (average): 36,000 (Google Analytics) [Editor's note: The number of unique visitor's has been updated.]
Mobile platform: Optimized mobile site, app forthcoming
Content focus: “Local news for the communities of Santa Barbara and Goleta. We keep our professional reporters focused on more complex issues — government, politics, breaking news. We ask the community to cover everything else.”
Geographic focus: Santa Barbara and Goleta, also some Montecito and Carpinteria, “but they both have strong weekly newspapers, so we try not to spend a lot of time doing something that somebody can get elsewhere.”
Target demographic: Women 30-60 with children — “definitely a professional audience interested in the schools.”
Annual operating budget: $250-000-500,000
Annual revenue: $250,000-500,000
Ad sales: Noozhawk doesn’t use an ad network and employs one-and-a-half ad reps; it gathers information about its readers through a readership survey (last completed in 2008; a new survey will roll out in Q1 2012)
Editorial staff: Four full-time journalists, one managing editor, two part-time reporters and a business writer
Social media: “We use both Facebook and Twitter. We’re constantly trying to learn how to use it better. I think Twitter works ideally for a news operation.”
Most popular features: K-12 education coverage (school board), breaking news
Media partnerships: Developing a content partnership with KEYT-TV (Santa Barbara ABC affiliate)
Primary digital competition: The Santa Barbara Independent and the Santa Barbara News-Press
What distinguishes it from the digital competition: “The professionalism of our news. I have a really young reporting staff, but my managing editor is a grizzled veteran like myself. We have some pretty high standards and we’ve been able to instill that culture and ethic into our reporting staff, and that has really been noticed.”
What’s next: “The original business plan called for us to perfect the model here and then scale it up elsewhere, but over the last year and a half I’ve abandoned that idea and put all my focus on perfecting here and actually scaling it up here in Santa Barbara — [building] a bigger newsroom and moving a bit more into the nonprofit world. That’s a huge part of our economy in Santa Barbara — we have about 1,300 nonprofits — so we’ve been adding features that cover that community like the industry that it is, which has been great for us. We’re looking to expand on the education side as well. We want to cover the community more comprehensively and exhaustively than anybody else.”
Comments (0) - Post a comment