Charlotte Media Diverge On Social Strategy
Charlotte, N.C.’s news sites are busily planning coverage to help readers follow the Democratic National Convention when it arrives here in September — and to help locals navigate around it.
WCNC.com, a TV site, for example, said it will have content letting Charlotte residents know which streets to avoid -- and out-of-town conventioneers know where to stay and eat in town.
As the convention approaches, media in this market of 3 million, ranked 25th by Nielsen, will be vying for traffic and advertising tied to it. They chased almost $867 million in local ad dollars spent here last year, according to media consultants Borrell Associates, about $131 million of which came in the form of online ads.
And local spending is expected to reach $1.1 billion by 2016, according to Borrell, with the online portion racing up 83%, to just under $240 million.
Social media is becoming more important in Charlotte as elsewhere, and will likely play a role come September. But in this market, a philosophical crack has developed along the social media fault line.
Perhaps the market’s most popular TV site, Cox Media Group’s WSOCtv.com, has embraced social media. In December, it added a Google Plus page (now that businesses can) to the ubiquitous Facebook page and Twitter feeds. And the ABC-affiliate has been working on a YouTube page as a place to post video, according to Jennifer Haynes-Watkins, manager of site services there.
WCNC.com, Charlotte’s Belo-owned NBC affiliate, and the second-most trafficked TV site, according to comScore, also has a new Google Plus page. It hasn’t gotten much traffic yet, according to Amy Lehtonen, the station’s director of digital media.
But Facebook pages posted by the station and its editorial staff have attracted more than 99,000 “likes,” she said. “We get a lot of news tips from people on Facebook,” she added.
User responses spike during severe weather, Lehtonen said. And the station’s chief meteorologist, an avid tweeter, has 10,000 followers, dwarfing the numbers for his competitors, she boasted.
But just as some newspaper officials questioned the wisdom of herding paying subscribers onto free websites, the Internet director at a third TV site here criticizes the strategy of diverting website followers to Facebook.
“Why not just send people to your prime property?” asked Rod Overton, Internet director for WBTV.com, a CBS affiliate owned by Raycom Media. “Why would you ever send them away?”
Yes, he allowed, WBTV does have a Facebook page, but it uses social media for news tips and rarely directs users there, instead working to lure people from Facebook to the main site, he said. “It’s a tool — not a destination.”
Plus, he complained, “Social media has made it harder for traditional media to stay focused.”
The dominant site here — The Charlotte Observer’s charlotteobserver.com — uses Facebook and Twitter to update readers and attract news tips, according to Rick Thames, editor at the McClatchy Co. publication.
Its 7,900 Facebook fan count suggests a less aggressive social media strategy than, say, WCNC.com’s.
Instead, the newspaper site has focused on forming partnerships with local bloggers and smaller sites to increase access to neighborhood news and make up for coverage lost in recent downsizings.
A 2009 grant from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, helped the Observer create the Charlotte News Alliance, which links to articles from about 20 partners, supplying local coverage the newspaper can’t always provide itself, Thames said.
Among alliance members is a site oriented to the African-American community, QCityMetro.com.
DavidsonNews.net, a site that covers a small town about 20 miles north of Charlotte, was a member but dropped out. David Boraks, publisher and executive editor of Davidson News LLC, which owns DavidsonNews and a sister site, CorneliusNews.net, said he decided he had nothing to gain from the partnership. “They [the Observer] were basically getting free content from us for a year.”
Even without the Observer, the Davidson site pulls in 30,000 monthly unique visitors while serving a town of around 10,000, and the company is doing well enough with local coverage to consider adding a third small-town site, Boraks said.
Meanwhile, the Observer is developing another alliance aimed at boosting arts coverage, using early funding from the Knight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Thames said. The paper has five partners in the arts alliance, he said.
In addition, the paper has stolen a strategy from public radio and recruited underwriters to pay for new arts, science/tech and youth news packages that appear in the paper each week and are posted on the site as well, Thames said.
Money from a local healthcare company allowed the paper to add two more pages of arts coverage in a weekly package called Arts Alive, he explained. Another two pages in a weekly Sci-Tech package are paid for by Duke Energy, and a two-page Young Achievers section appears on Tuesday, complements of a natural gas firm, he said.
Comments (7) - Post a comment