Digital Splits Spur Creativity In San Antonio
The San Antonio digital news market today is a child of divorce. If at first this seems a little too dramatic a way to characterize it, consider that three of its top local players are the products of dissolved partnerships, each now living in separate URLs with their individual settlements, cruising the singles market of potential users with polished up (or wholly reinvented) digital brands.
And maybe all the shakeups were the best thing for this DMA of nearly 2.5 million, 75% of whom live in households with broadband connections according to data from Borrell Associates, a market research firm. Across the Web and mobile landscape, San Antonio's local players have experimented aggressively, tapping deeply into social media to develop strong relationships with users, rolling out numerous apps and verticals and keeping in mind the qualities that transcend technology — strong writing and voice — when developing and positioning content.
Interestingly, little of that voice is in Spanish in a market with a 63% Hispanic population according to Census data, but local sites say Hispanic cultural content often trumps language in this largely bilingual community.
The market's undisputed leader is MySanAntonio.com, the website for the city's daily paper, The San Antonio Express-News, which consistently draws more than 1 million unique visitors each month according to comScore data. Also known as MySA.com, it is one of the fairly recent divorcees, having split from longtime digital media partner KENS5.com, the site for the market's Belo-owned CBS affiliate, in late 2008.
By some reckoning, the Hearst-owned daily made off with the more bountiful side of the settlement, taking with it the site's URL, digital staff and much of its content. "I think the companies had gotten to a point where they wanted to pursue different ways of promoting their own brands," said Mike Howell, content manager for MySA.com.
MySA's digital revenue has been strong since the split. According to Eric Braun, executive producer for Hearst's Texas digital properties, digital accounts for about 18% of the paper's revenue. "It's definitely growing," Braun said. "They're hoping to get to 25% fairly soon."
With a digital staff of eight people and a newsroom of more than 120, MySA certainly commands the bulk of the market's news resources. But Braun said the site is never complacent about its top position. Of the local network affiliate sites, which have been gaining ground, he said, "We're putting a more aggressive effort into breaking news, weather and traffic in the coming years, so that will hopefully beat them back."
MySA is also almost obsessively watching its users' patterns and preferences, Howell said. "We are constantly watching what our audience is hungry for," he said, noting that means daily reads of its internal Omniture analytics, following reader comments and watching the barometers of user response on Facebook and Twitter closely each day.
Social is a critical front in keeping readers engaged, Howell said, and everyone in the newsroom is conscripted in the effort. "Reporters and photographers really spend time building up their beats with their sources and the community that is interested in what they're covering," he said. "They don't necessarily rely on the [Facebook] homepage to promote it."
Howell said that the site is also taking another look at its article templates to make sure that they are sufficiently cross-referencing other content that might hold users for longer on the site, and that he is closely tracking users' navigational patterns on the site. "Where can we put content entry points that will keep people on the site?" he said.
Meanwhile, MySA’s former digital partner, KENS5, has moved to a new URL and completely rebuilt its site and digital identity. "The idea was not just to build a website, but to build an entire digital strategy and help transition from TV only with Web on the side to an integrated multimedia distribution platform, and on the sales side to provide a whole lot more options for all of our advertisers," said Jan Boyd, director of digital media at KENS5.com.
With a digital staff of four others and a massive task in front of her, Boyd drew on her experience working on news sites in the Bay Area to focus on the elemental characteristics of the new digital platform, namely developing a very distinct tone, voice and visual presence for the site that strongly asserted a sense of locality.
"It's the headlines, it's how we handle the stories and their placement, it's how we handle breaking news," she said. It's also how they handle design: Boyd's managing editor has a strong design background, so she tapped it for everything from making sure stories were evenly aligned on the page to ensuring that the city of San Antonio — its skyline and its name — figured prominently into page templates. "We try to have a very warm, local, inviting feeling," she said.
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