Newspaper, broadcast station join forces online in NewsOK.com

This column appeared July 25, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Convergence has received something of a black eye lately. Black eye? That might be understating things a bit. We’re talking broken ribs, multiple lacerations and third-degree burns, thanks to the spectacular flameout of AOL Time Warner, the poster child of media convergence.

But not all converged news operations are created equal. Case in point: NewsOK.com, a joint operation of the Daily Oklahoman and KWTV News9 in Oklahoma City.

“We didn’t undertake convergence to trim expenses. It was done to boast the depth of the news product we’ve built up.”

Both news organizations bring considerable assets to NewsOK, which will mark its first birthday August 19. The Oklahoman, the largest news operation in the state, has a daily circulation of 209,000 and newsroom staff of 160. News9, the leading newscast in town, can spur viewers to pick up the next day’s paper with a preview of a joint news project, or send them to NewsOK.

“It’s amazing to me how a newscaster can mention a story, and we see an immediate spike in our traffic,” says Kelly Dyer, general manager of NewsOK.com. “We had a 5 p.m. live chat on women’s health, and within minutes of its mention on the air, it was maxed out for the full hour. There’s something about the immediacy of TV that’s different than printing a link in a newspaper.”

The partnership is one of the few converged news outfits owned by different corporate parents. (MySanAntonio, a joint enterprise of the San Antonio Express-News and KENS-TV, is another.) NewsOK draws 350,000 unique visitors and 12.5 million page views a month. Before the joint Web site replaced the separate newspaper and broadcast sites, the Daily Oklahoman site was drawing 6 million page views a month and News9 less than a third that amount.

Continue reading »

Now that they’ve grown up, what have city guides turned out to be?

This column appeared June 18, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

What ever happened to city guides?

After staking claims during the mad online land grab of the mid-1990s, a few hardy survivors are still around, though much evolved. Others have morphed into “local networks” or city portals. And still others have given up the ghost, fleeing the space that just a few years ago was being hyped as a bonanza of local advertising riches.

But let’s forgo the usual business stories about content-driven sites hemorrhaging money during the online advertising slump. How are today’s city guides serving their editorial mission?

The answer, in short, is: pretty well, given today’s lowered expectations.

First, a disclosure. I’m a fan of city guides. I used to help run the editorial department of San Francisco Sidewalk during Microsoft’s brief fling with creating local content in 1997-99.

Clashing head on with Citysearch, AOL Digital City, Knight Ridder’s JustGo entertainment guides and a raft of other city guides, Sidewalk set the standard from an editorial standpoint. Each editorial team developed a rich, consumer-friendly database of venues, restaurants, places to go, movies, events, nightlife, sports, visitor guides, interactive features and more.

Continue reading »