A little over two years ago, when Rick Hirsch took on the job of "Director of Multimedia/New Projects" at the Miami Herald, the paper's web site was not much different than the Spec.com. Oh sure its deadtree namesake was bigger than the Spec (daily circ of 312,000, a newsroom of about 400) and the website was deeper and more complex than ours, both in keeping with the size and wealth of the market they serve.
But Miami.com was essentially a dead archive, a prettied up dumping ground for the same stuff you could find in the paper that day. In other words a lot like the Spec.com has been.
Today the site offers visitors:
• Today's news - today
• local, national and international news updates
• photo galleries
• classified ads with one-click jumps to jobs, cars and apartments
• Multimedia special reports (there's one now on Hurricane Katrina)
• a special "storm" website with tips, bulletins, storm radar and detailed coverage of each hurricane's progress
• traffic web cams
• a map and direction service
• message boards
• on-line subscriptions and ad bookings
• highly targeted e-mail newsletters (business, technology, football, morning news, 4 p.m. news updates,) all sponsored by advertisers and linking back to the site's content
All of that can be found right off their front page.
In addition, the Herald contributes staff-reported content to a daily radio news program on a local National Public Radio station and shares stories (in exchange for credit) with a local TV news station.
Impressive? You bet it is. Cruising Miami.com, it's easy to get excited about the possibilities for our own evolving web site. But even better than the marvelous toys on display (in a surprisingly simple, non-flashy layout) are the numbers: This year their multimedia/new projects division will turn over $14 million in revenue to the Herald. $14 million.
In a recent conference call with the learning newsroom's Tech Gang, Hirsch said that next year, ALL of the Herald's bottom-line growth is expected to come from the web and targeted projects. For the Herald, the future has already arrived — and it's a profitable place.
$14 million — and they did all with a staff of ..... six.
Six, and the rest of their 400 strong newsroom, that is.
The Tech Gang ran up a big phone bill in the conference call with Hirsch the other week, probing him on the Herald's methods and mistakes. We learned a lot that will inform the recommendations we make in the weeks and months ahead.
Let's take a look at some of the high points of what Hirsch had to say.
On his Web philosophy:
• "Our (the newspaper industry's) circulation hasn't declined because our product is lousy - people's lifestyles have changed."
• "The news cycle is contestant and we need to change our own orientation, we need to tell stories when we have them." Don't wait until the next day to tell your story, after you've been beaten by radio, television and everyone else's web site.
• The web and print attract different readers.
• "The web is a place people hide when they should be working - our peak times are first thing in the morning, lunch and at the end of the day"
• Devote the most (web-centred) resources to content that will have a long shelf life.
• Getting scoops and breaking news up on the web quickly builds readership and enhances 'stickiness'. One time when one of their Miami pro sports stars fell ill with a kidney ailment editors agonized about putting it on the web before it could get it into print. They put it on the web and then one editor called ESPN and tipped them off to it. 15 mins later on air ESPN reported the illness and credited Miami.com with breaking the story — traffic went through the roof.
• Web content is just another edition of your paper, one geared to a different reader.
On how Miami.com is produced:
• Hirsch's got a dedicated content staff of six: a high end web/flash designer and five content editors who work shifts to review content (print, audio, video, graphic and photographic) and publish it to the website.
• The site is 'staffed':
Mon-Fri from 5am - 1am
Sat from 8am-midnight
Sun from 3 p.m. to midnight.• All staff and all sections contribute to the web each day. "We have no parallel reporting staff. We began by asking reporters to file early versions of their stories but we didn't have a lot of buy-in. So I began assigning quotas to (content) editors - I want 2 stories from business, 2 from sports, 2 from metro etc. each day. It became the editors responsibility." It worked. Many reporters now include the web and multimedia content in their thinking about their stories.
• The "lede" story — usually a local news piece — is changed on their home page every two hours. Scoops and breaking news are natural lede items. At any one time their home page holds 4-8 local 'today' stories and an equal number of national/international 'today' stories.
• In sports, agate and all things high school sports are made for the web. Back up the truck and dump it all in.
On who visits Miami.com:
• Miami.com has about 1 million (free) registered viewers. 110,000 of them visit daily ‹ 70,000 of whom everyday go straight to Miami.com, (i.e. they're not referred via Miami.com newsletters or other sites or news aggregators).
• The average visit is 4 and 1/2 minutes (our print 'visit' here is something like, what, 32 minutes?)
• 80,000 people have signed up for their "5 minute Herald", a list of morning headlines and story abstracts. A quarter of these will click through to stories on the site.
• The web and their paper attract different audiences. (There's something like a 25 % overlap.) (For an extended look at what that simple fact should tell us about our own web policy, go here)
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