Hyperlocal, Paywalls Skip Sleepy Syracuse

The Syracuse media market is a clear example of the importance of catering to your audience.

In this region, which averages about 117 inches of snow each winter -- and was blanketed with 70-plus inches of snow in December 2010 alone -- log onto the major local Web sites and what do you see? Not just Doppler radar, but triple-Doppler radar, time-stamped photos of local streets and -- for $6.95-per-month -- personalized weather alerts sent via e-mail or to a mobile phone.

“The most popular section of our site is our weather section … by far,” said Jeremy Ryan, managing editor of CNYCentral.com, which serves three Syracuse television stations -- Barrington Broadcasting Group-owned WSTM and WSTQ, as well as WTVH, which is owned by Granite Broadcasting Corp. but managed by Barrington under a shared services agreement. “Another big feature is school closings,” he added.

Just as the The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., has found a market for its hurricane-tracking application, Syracuse Web sites lure visitors with flashy weather tools posted on home pages.

Prominent weather coverage makes The Post-Standard’s Syracuse.com a tempting homepage for computer users, said Steve Carlic, online team leader for the newspaper.

Meanwhile, some of the big issues being dealt with by Web sites in other markets have yet to register here.

Syracuse.com has considered hyperlocal news coverage, according to Bob Lloyd, a professor of practice at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. But television stations here seem uninterested.

Part of the reason is -- again -- the market they serve. Viewership sprawls over miles of sometimes rural terrain. “You can drive an hour and a half or two hours in any direction from the intersection of [I-81 and I-90] and still be in our viewing area,” Ryan said. “We could spend an eternity just building the little sites for each community in our area.”

Susan Beck, executive producer of online content for YNN.com, which serves six regional Time Warner cable networks, seconds the notion. It takes eight hours to drive across YNN.com’s coverage area, she said.

Charging for access to content is another pressing issue elsewhere that hasn’t been pushed here yet.

None of this is to say that Syracuse is a sleepy market. With the newspaper site and popular sites for several local television stations, Syracuse has a competitive media environment that gives advertisers a lot of options to choose from, Lloyd said.

An estimated $240 million was spent on local advertising in this market in 2010, according to media consulting and research firm Borrell Associates. About 13% of that -- $35.4 million -- went to online ads, Borrell said. Online dollars are expected to almost double by 2015, growing to $69 million, or almost 19% of total local ad spending, according to the researcher.

YNN.com general manager and news director Ron Lombard credits his network, with its 24-hour news format and insistence that reporters also file online, of ramping up the competition for breaking news. “We’re very, very quick in this market to get content online,” he said.

While others agreed with Lombard’s assessment of speed, they argued over the reason. “My personal opinion: I don’t think that [YNN’s coverage] played much of a factor,” said Carlic.

The Syracuse market became more focused on breaking news online and frequent site updates just as markets did elsewhere, Carlic and others said. “We wanted to take full advantage of what the Web is good at, which is breaking news,” Carlic said.

Syracuse.com dominates the online scene here. With 49.4% of area adults logging on during a 30-day-period, according to The Media Audit, it ranks among the top sites in the nation in terms of market reach. (9WSYR.com comes in second with 32.9%, and YNN.com ranks third at 25.9%.)

The newspaper site benefits from its early entry into the fray, the strength of the underlying print publication … and the fact that it nabbed a very desirable domain name, Lloyd said.

Carlic said recent efforts at Syracuse.com have included a revamping of the site this past summer and the addition of Facebook Connect to allow readers to register through the social network. But he refused to discuss future plans for the newspaper’s site, referring questions to a corporate official, who did not return phone calls.

Syracuse.com has also looked for ways to take advantage of the shelf life of its articles, Carlic said. One recent project was built around continuing stories about a high school in a poor neighborhood that lost its football field to county plans for a sewage plant. Links to earlier stories pop up when someone searches the series title, Carlic said, and that has pulled in more readers.

The paper also posts a feature called “Lunchtime Links” that takes readers to an amusing story each day.

Advance Internet, which creates sites for Advance Publications Inc. newspapers around the country, handles the operation of the Syracuse paper’s Web site, Carlic said -- setting strategic goals and providing the technology tools to make it all work.