TV news sites just don’t get it
The Web was supposed to help news organizations expand their reach and make it easy for people to find the news they want when they want it. But when it comes to local television, it seems, that’s just not happening.
According to a new report from the consulting firm AR&D, the vast majority of visitors to local TV sites–90 percent–are already fans of the stations, so they’re not reaching a new audience online. And only half of any given station’s “fans” visit its website. ”Stations are only playing to their on-air audience and not even doing a very good job of that,” says AR&D senior analyst Rory Ellender.
At least part of the reason is the type of news and information stations put on their sites. “We consistently hear that most people see local TV websites as just a rehash of what the station does on-air,” says Earle Jones, AR&D’s senior vice president of research. “Also, the URL’s most stations use (call-letters.com) suggest something much more narrow that a community information portal.”
The AR&D study is based on 2,200 interviews with consumers in a range of markets and some of their comments are sobering.
“It’s the same on TV as it is on their website. Why get the same thing twice?” said one woman, who described herself as a regular local TV news viewer who rarely or never visited local station sites. “If I can’t get all the info I need from the news when it is on, then there’s not any more info on their web site. It is just a summary of the story you see on the news,” said another.
Another frequent complaint was that sites aren’t user-friendly. “They are usually poorly designed and they make it difficult to simply find the specific news story you came to read about,” one man said. “They could vastly improve their websites by having an actual working search function.” In 2010, it seems to me that falls into the category of “duh.”
These dispiriting results echo the findings of the RTDNA/Hofstra survey announced earlier this year, which found that while traffic was up at local station websites, there was little change in the number of unique visitors from the year before. As we wrote then, TV has a long way to go online. Still true.
One company, Internet Broadcasting, that runs websites for a lot of TV stations seems to go for the SEO approach to news. Tabloid-style headlines, but updates on subpages are sporadic. One in Phoenix had sports and news stories over a week old. Unacceptable for a major market.
Missing from this article is any analysis of whether local TV station would actually make money by investing more heavily in their Web sites…Are these results dispiriting, or actually uplifting because they demonstrate disciplined management teams unwilling to spend on wasteful projects with no payback?…You might as well take local TV stations to task for not publishing great books, magazines, pamphlets, iPad apps, for not sending interns into the streets wearing sandwich boards and on and on…If they’re producing valuable programming, and local TV is the most profitable distribution channel for it, I see nothing wrong with that…
What I feel is missing in this article is the reality in most newsrooms where the web folk and the broadcast folk do not work or plan together. There is still animosity about who is and isn’t working to make money for the company. That trickles down to the foot soldiers. A broadcast employee goes out and covers a story. Sends information back to the web team at the station. Web teams like text. Broadcast employees focus on video. There is not enough true convergence between the two needs. The wall between the two camps at the same company is counterproductive. Toss in corporate wants to downsize and consolidate resources. Many times wanting to produce all station web sites from a central location. Doing this loses contact for the true local viewers and context for important local stories is lost because those, far away, have no idea what is and isn’t important. These are LOCAL station web sites. Homogenous web sites just thrown up to say “look, we have a web site” are a waste of time and money.