Gannett Daily Gains 20% of Its Traffic from Blogs
Important Details: There’s nothing like sports to kindle passionate interest in news. Combine that passion with blogging, and news companies can find big payoffs in building new online audiences.
There’s no bigger baseball rivalry in the U.S. these days than the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The teams play each other 18 times during the course of a season, and each game arouses great fan following. Gannett’s Journal News, located in suburban Westchester County just north of New York City, long ago understood the importance of the rivalry.
It has been Peter Abraham’s blog, though, that has shown how viral online power does so much more than the print paper.
Peter Abraham covers the Yankees for the Journal News, which has a 130,000 Sunday print circulation. He was the first daily reporter in New York City area to start a Yankees blog. His blog — The LoHud Yankees Blog — now does gangbusters traffic, especially if you line up his paper’s relatively small circulation vs. the bigger dailies a little to the south.
Henry Freeman, the Journal News’s editor, gushed with enthusiasm about the connection with the audience. “Our Yankees blog has had 243,680 page views and 5,552 comments on blog postings over the last 48-hour period,” he told me. “Those are incredible numbers, even for the Yankees. The reason is the Yankees are playing the Red Sox and Peter Abraham, our Yankees beat writer, reached out to the writer of the Red Sox blog on WEEI.com in Boston. The two bloggers have been cross-promoting the posts on each of the blogs. It has gotten the fan bases of each team interacting and the results have increased traffic for both sites. We may do a podcast with them for the next series.”
While the Yankee blog is a seasonal favorite, it represents a key to the paper’s online strategy for LoHud.com (or Lower Hudson Valley). Overall, blogs now contribute 20% of the site’s traffic, a number that is about four times higher than other U.S. dailies. LoHud offers 54 staff blogs, 13 alone devoted to high school sports, paralleling a major initative of Gannett’s, the HighSchoolSports network. “You have to weed them out,” from time to time, says Freeman, finding out what works. Then there are the episodic blogs, around such events as major golf tournaments.
Freeman says that bloggers get some basic training and some guidelines, including those on currency and timeliness. Post at least daily, they are told, and most exceed that number. Yankees blogger Peter Abraham may write 15 to 20 posts a day.
Increasingly, blogs are taking over center positions on webpages, positions”stories” once held; they are often more current, with more reader feedback. To those who are concerned about the blurring of blog post and story lines, Freeman advises editors to figure it out as they go along, applying the level of editing to blog posts they think useful . “Report for the web, write for the paper,” is the paper’s guideline, and that often means getting the “what” out there fast online and more background and context in the story. Still, these definitions are in constant evolution.
Kate Marymont, Gannett’s vp/news, says that LoHud is a good example of its new Information Centers approach to local journalism. While cross-training of journalists is important, that doesn’t mean everybody needs to do everything, she says. “Part of our evolution is thinking that not everyone can do everything. We thinking more about specialists for print, for mobile, for digital”. And for blogging. Some take to it; others don’t.
Marymont is also a proponent of beat blogging, in which a number of reporters focus on a single community issues. She says she’s seen it work as Gannett papers used it around community child safety issues. “It’s a tool for connecting all the different players – county, state, federal officials. They were tripping all over each other.” On the website, “they were sharing, and the public was watching.” Now, she says beat blogging is morphing as Gannett’s newspapers dip their toes in using Twitter and Facebook to connect up journalists and the community around big stories and issues.
Implications: Outsell believes the payoff of online-first publishing are starting to appear and be counted. Blogging is not someone else’s business, but a great new tool for daily journalists. At papers such as the Journal News, we can see that a bridge has been crossed. Blogging is no longer an experiment, or what someone else does; it’s a way to do journalism better. Many other daily newspapers that are behind the curve on such learning can pick up the tricks of the trade quickly.
The next big challenge is for newspaper to adequately monetize their blog content. It’s often sold differently, and more haphazardly, than “stories” to advertisers. That’s a mistake. In fact, blog posts often gain more engagement with readers, engagement — attention — that advertisers should crave.
Further, there’s one more big plus for publishers; their working journalists produce more content for the same pay. Now that’s a stealth revolution of which they should take full advantage.