Gannett's AZCentral Rules In Digital Phoenix
The Phoenix DMA is better known to those who live there as the “Valley of the Sun.” It’s a sprawling string of cities, nearly 90 minutes’ drive from end to end, and its name, size and desert terrain conjure images of some lost Egyptian kingdom. Fittingly, this digital media market also has a pharaoh, and in Phoenix, it is indisputably Gannett.
Gannett’s AZCentral.com, a geo-branded convergence of its local newspaper property, the Arizona Republic and its NBC affiliate, KPNX (12 News), sits atop the pyramid of unique visitors with a towering 3,057,000 for October 2011, according to data from comScore. Its closest competitors, MyFoxPhoenix.com, the site for Fox O&O KSAZ, and ABC15.com, the Scripps-owned site for KNXV, fall well below at 529,000 and 501,000 unique visitors for that same month, respectively, according to comScore.
Behind that traffic gleams an enormous Gannett operation featuring a converged newsroom of between 300-400 staffers across four regional offices. There’s also an aggressive digital sales staff whose close relationship with Gannett Local, the company’s Phoenix-based national telesales arm, has powered a digital revenue stream of roughly 20% of its total earnings according to Mike Coleman, VP of digital media at AzCentral. “It’s really serious business,” Coleman said.
And while independent news sites have played only a peripheral role in the market so far, students at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism have stepped into the breach. Their public policy-centered stories have found a healthy wholesale niche of their own to media outlets across the state.
Nevertheless, the biggest media news headline of the year belongs to Gannett, where in January the company completed the process of merging its downtown Republic newsroom with studios for KPNX. The physical move capped off a digital process that had been years in the making, as both outlets have long subsumed their Web identities under the AZCentral aegis.
Coleman said that the geo-branded focus of AZCentral, which had been the Republic’s online identity for more than a decade, was a conscious strategy to which Gannett stayed committed despite vigorous internal debates among the TV and newspaper personnel.
“Thankfully, we did not do what so many newspapers did, which was to bounce back and forth between strategies,” Coleman said. “We’ve really put a lot into this brand, and I think there was some good executive decision making of ‘we’re going to get behind it, and that’s going to allow us to be the dominant player in the market.’”
Since KPNX began its first broadcast from its new home on Jan. 12, the convergence has exceeded transitional expectations, said Mark Hiland, director of digital operations in the AZCentral newsroom. “We’ve had fewer issues than we anticipated,” he said. “There are a lot of synergies between the properties and what they do best.”
That has meant heavy video contributions from the 12 News side and text-heavy coverage of watchdog and government accountability reporting, along with an emphasis on housing and economic stories, from the Republic. An integrated desk, meanwhile, handles breaking news. And to head off any potential internal conflict, AZCentral.com’s home page is a kind of digital demilitarized zone, brokered by independent editors who make their placement decisions based on what works best for the digital medium regardless of pressures that may come from the newspaper’s editors or TV producers.
As Steve Elliot, a professor of practice at the Cronkite School, observed, the structure seems to be holding well. “It seems to me that in touring the newsroom and seeing how they run things and how the staff work together, it makes you believe that convergence can work,” he said.
On the sales side, Coleman is confident that Gannett’s tent is held up by a number of steady poles. Among them are verticals CareerBuilder and Jobs.com, in which Gannett is a stakeholder, strong display ad sales on AZCentral.com and growing revenue from email, social media, search and reputation management.
Coleman said selling search capabilities is roughly an $750,000 a year business for AZCentral, while email marketing has pulled in about the same. “This is the unsexiest digital form on the planet, but it still works,” he said. “It’s absolutely a crime that it isn’t $1-2 million for us already.”
Coleman added that after a rough, housing collapse-fueled 2010, 2011 was a breakthrough year for local digital sales, partly spurred by greater sales staff buy in. “We tie it to their compensation, so everybody’s going to make less money if they don’t hit a certain quota for digital, frankly,” he said.
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