Social Media Boosts Fortunes At WTHR

In many markets, digital media have spawned audacious, independent news outlets that complement — and sometimes compete with — their print and broadcast forbears. But in Indianapolis, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al have become favored tools of the region’s leading daily newspaper and TV network affiliates, and helped them assert control of the Web.

“I do think legacy media have a sort of stranglehold,” said Dan Drew, the interim executive associate dean of the Indiana University School of Journalism at IUPUI. “I think they’re very strong.”

A Media Audit survey conducted late last year showed the Web sites of the Indianapolis Star and NBC affiliate WTHR in a virtual dead heat, with a third of all respondents saying they had visited in the previous 30 days. Although other measurement sources show a less dramatic gain for WTHR and have the station as the market's No. 3 digital player. Sites belonging to CBS affiliate WISH and FOX59 were named by a quarter of Media Audit respondents, and there is little evidence Indy’s online hegemony has shifted dramatically since then.

If anything, the popular might be getting more popular. WTHR.com, for instance, has drawn more than a million unique visitors in nine consecutive months, according to Digital Media Director Amy Parish. The station overhauled its outdated Web site last year, Parish said, and viewers have responded by logging on more frequently.

“The Web site is a direct reflection of our on-air product,” she said. “In every newscast, we’re directing viewers to the site for more content.”

Parish has led an all-out Facebook campaign at WTHR.com. In May, when the station had only 8,000 “likes” on the social networking site, WTHR hired Kyle Lacy, a digital media guru and the author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies, to help bolster its Facebook presence. The result, Parish said, was a new assignment: “Every on-air talent had to have a fan page and had to update it at least once per day.”

Reporters and anchors met the effort with “trepidation,” Parish said; management eyed it with skepticism.

“I remember the first question someone asked was, ‘How will this help our bottom line?’” Parish recalled.

Seven months later, WTHR has almost 100,000 Facebook likes, and WTHR.com advertising spots are sold out.

Social media is a similarly strategic element at IndyStar.com, but the newspaper Web site, with a distinctly harder news edge, is devoting resources to another digital instrument: computer-assisted reporting. CAR, a buzzword at journalism conferences, is actually older than most people realize, according to Mark Nichols, the Star’s computer-assisted reporter.

“I don’t think computer-assisted reporting is necessarily a new frontier anymore,” Nichols said. “I’ve been doing it full-time for 10 years and have been doing it since the early ’90s.”

At its core, CAR is about using computers to collect, organize and analyze data — certainly not a recent development. But if computer-assisted reporting is not new, it is definitely changing, Nichols says. Media leaders such as The New York Times and ProPublica are using CAR techniques not only behind the scenes of investigative reports, but also to “tell stories on the Web using data in a way that couldn’t be done before in print.”

“At the Star, what I’m trying to do is look to those institutions and try to emulate it on a local basis,” Nichols said.

In November, for example, IndyStar.com created an interactive map to help readers digest every nuance of the Indianapolis mayoral election. The map featured precinct-by-precinct data about voter turnout, income, race, unemployment and campaign contributions. It would have been impractical, if not impossible, to replicate the map in the newspaper.

Right now, Nichols is playing with the latest batch of U.S. Census data, looking for storylines fit for print — and for the Web alone.

“For years, I was part of the investigative team,” Nichols said, “but the Star recently formed a digital team, and I’ve moved there. It’s part of the paper’s emphasis on trying to think digital first. Some of the things I work on could be Web exclusive.”

The Indiana Business Journal also delineates — rather firmly — between print and online content. IBJ.com makes breaking news, blogs, wire stories, and some other material available to anyone, but since May the site has charged for access to almost all articles that appear in the weekly print edition.

“That’s our premium content,” Online Editor Andrea Muirragui Davis said, “and to give it away would be to devalue a subscription.”

The Journal offers three subscription levels: digital for $1.25 per week, print for $1.52 per week, both for $1.64 per week. Digital subscriptions constitute a small percentage of the whole, Davis admitted, but the partial paywall is “working well enough that we’re sticking with it.”