Video, Mobile Drive Roanoke's Digital Scene
If you’re looking for the frontline of digital media, you won’t find it in Roanoke, Va. When the media research firm Borrell Associates conducted a survey there in 2011, a third of respondents said they had not accessed the Internet in the last month; 28% said they don’t even have Internet access in their homes.
“We can’t fill our newscast with ‘Go on Facebook; go on Twitter’ because a lot of people will feel left out,” said Claudia Rupcich, managing Web editor at Allbritton Communications Co.-owned WSET.com.
But the ABC affiliate and the rest of Roanoke’s news outlets are nevertheless pursuing new media ventures — some with gusto — believing their market’s digital penetration is bound to deepen.
“Nobody wants to say we’re a backwater, but maybe we’re not chasing as fast as some other places,” said Peter Vieth, the legal editor at Virgina Lawyers Weekly and a longtime Roanoke resident. “It’s coming. Maybe just a little slower.”
The Roanoke Times’ Roanoke.com is leading the advance with roughly two dozen blogs, almost 7,000 Facebook fans, and some of the slickest multimedia production to be found on any newspaper Web site. Producer Ryan Loew puts together feature video packages about subjects ranging from civil rights to tilapia (yes, the fish), and does so in a slightly artsy style viewers don’t see on local airwaves.
“Video is something we’ve been doing here for a while,” Online Projects Editor Meg Martin said. “I’ve been here for almost five years, and we were doing it well before that. We were experimenting with video when it was new for newspapers.”
Roanoke.com draws about 300,000 unique visitors per month, according to Compete.com, appreciably more than any other news site in the market. The Web allows the Times to complement print stories with features that are simply unprintable. Online, for instance, readers can tour the new Roanoke Public Library, with 360-degree views of the interior created from staff photographers’ panoramic shots.
And, of course, the site affords unlimited space for written material that doesn’t fit in the print edition. Weather forecasting — a staple at TV stations but an afterthought at most newspapers — has a special place at Roanoke.com. Kevin Myatt’s Weather Journal is a stream of meteorological memoranda, a daily bonus for fans of Myatt’s thrice-weekly weather column. (How many papers have a weather columnist?) It’s geeky but accessible enough for the average reader to digest.
Accessibility was on Rupcich’s mind when she led a redesign of WSET.com this fall. “We added more top stories and pictures, and included social tool boxes on the homepage,” she explained. “We also changed the dropdown menus.”
The alterations may not sound exciting, but study after study shows the visual layout of a Web site is a major factor in attracting and retaining visitors. WSET’s unique visitor tally rose throughout the autumn, from 88,000 in September to 93,000 in October to 115,000 in November.
WSET.com also has a mobile interface that offers easier browsing on smartphones and other devices. One popular feature is “News to Go,” a 90-second miniature newscast — not borrowed from the air but shot exclusively for the Web — that rounds up the day’s four or five most important stories.
The station’s competitors, Schurz Communications Inc.’s WDBJ7.com and Media General Broadcast Group’s WSLS.com, offer mobile sites too; all three now have iPhone and Android applications to deliver news, weather and sports throughout the day.
The shared theme is personalization: The sites and apps allow busy readers to filter content by location and subject, so they get only the stuff that interests them.
In a few cases, when mainstream content isn’t quite personalized enough, independent media have filled the gaps. In nearby Christiansburg, Terry Ellen Carter and Tacy Newell-Foutz started a progressive blog called Think, Christiansburg! The site rivals CraigsList for austerity, but its hyperlocal entries are thoughtful and articulate.
They’re also influential. In 2008, a local developer sued Carter and Newell-Foutz over a series of critical blog posts he claimed were libelous. The developer, Roger Woody, sought more than $30 million in damages.
“We were just working to make things better, to draw attention to local issues,” said Carter, who has since ceded control of the blog to Newell-Foutz.
The case became a sort of First Amendment referendum in the digital age. A complicating factor, Carter said, was that Think, Christiansburg! hosted Google advertisements, which assign ads to Web pages based on the pages’ content.
“We wrote about this unsightly dirt pile left by (Woody’s) construction company, so the ads that got put on our site were for other construction companies,” Carter explained. “He said we were trying to harm his business by putting those ads there, but really we didn’t control them.”
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