Social Creativity Fuels Nashville Online

In the South’s beacon city for singer/songwriters, it’s little surprise that digital news has gotten its biggest lift from creative thinking. The market’s leading players, Gannett-owned daily The Tennessean and Newschannel5.com, the site for Landmark Media Enterprises-owned CBS affiliate WTVF, have fueled their competition by tapping inventive approaches to user interaction and community investment.

For both sites, digital revenue isn’t just a hazy future prospect but a viable and growing stream with feeders coming in from social media, digital agency services and issue-oriented sponsorships. And yet one front that remains relatively untapped is mobile, where many of the top-performing local sites have no plans to release apps until later in 2012.

The Tennessean, which had 756,000 unique visitors last November according to comScore data, is among those still waiting on an app, but that hasn’t hampered its growth in other areas, particularly on the revenue front. Digital sales manager Kelly Eldridge said that 20% of the paper’s revenue came from digital in 2011, a number she’s targeting to expand to 30% this year and 40% within the next few years. “It’s something that we’ve always looked to grow,” she said.

One way in which the Tennessean is doing that is through an in-house digital agency called 1100 Broadway (named for its street address), which launched two years ago. In that same period, growth in online display and retail ads rose 85%, Eldridge said.

Newschannel 5, which had 465,000 unique visitors in November according to comScore, plays its revenue figures more closely to the vest, but station manager Lyn Plantinga said that digital “is both substantial and growing. The website is profitable, making a substantial contribution to the bottom line.”

Plantinga attributes that in part to the station having staked an early digital claim in the market. “We were selling ads in this market when many of our competitors weren’t even posting content yet,” she said, “so we really had the first mover advantage in digital media and we’ve worked very hard to stay on top.”

Newschannel 5 is one of the few players on the mobile front with a news app that is ranked the 6th most trafficked mobile site in the country, according to LSN.

That path to the top was also forged by Newschannel 5’s serious commitment to weather, a major driver to the site. “This is a market that’s susceptible to tornadoes, extreme heat and when we get snow the city gets shut down,” Plantinga said.

Accordingly, Newschannel5.com features a custom-built weather product with extensive animated radar imagery (including HD), along with pages customized by community and featuring live weather cameras.

A watershed moment on the station’s path to growth also came with the May 2010 floods that left much of Nashville’s downtown, including the station’s first floor, under water. “Our engineers put on waders and took equipment from our newsroom and moved it up a floor and managed to keep us on the air throughout the floods,” Plantinga said. Everything on that first floor — including the newsroom and news editing facilities, were lost, but Newschannel 5 also had a pivotal gain.

“We got over 16,000 pieces of user-generated content (UGC) in the 10 days surrounding the flood,” Plantinga said. “It was a seminal event for news in the market. Online, we did over 22 million page views that month.”

Newschannel 5 has continued to aggressively solicit and harness UGC since that point through its My5 UGC platform, and Plantinga said it remains a key tool in helping the station to cover the many nooks in its sprawling DMA, which extends to parts of northern Alabama and southern Kentucky.

With one staffer assigned to managing the station’s social media presence, the Facebook and Twitter front has also been important for Newschannel 5, but that’s also where it’s meeting with stiff competition from the Tennessean. The daily, too, maintains a social media director along with requiring all staffers to maintain a presence in the social space where they have their own professional accounts.

Twitter has been a particularly viable platform for the Tennessean, and the paper has parlayed its following there into a series of TweetUps over the past year and a half. “It’s one thing to talk to our audience online, but real conversations and real relationships are not just digital ones,” said Knight Stivender, senior editor for digital at the Tennessean.

Stivender said that the paper has been partnering with local businesses, including local breweries and chocolate companies, to host the events. “The crowd gets to meet each other in real life,” she said. “They’ve seen each other talking on Twitter or Facebook, and this is a chance for them to put a face to the handle.”

It’s also a chance for the Tennessean to make steps towards monetizing social media. One of its biggest TweetUps happened last fall at downtown’s Hutton Hotel, where fashion writer Cathi Aycock led “Nashville’s Biggest Makeover,” a day-long event featuring free mini-makeovers for readers and non-surgical facelifts for a few grand prize winners courtesy of a platinum-level sponsor, along with another sponsor donating clothes and accessories for a built-in fashion show.