Online Branding: Kill Your Call Letters?
Fun! Wait. Who Are You, Again?
Michael Malone at Broadcasting and Cable has an interesting quote from Steve Safran at AR&D regarding local television websites and the use of call letters in the URL: "By using your call letters, you're automatically limiting yourself to those who follow your newscasts," Safran said. "Why not open it up, make it more inclusive and pull in a whole new audience online."
Okay. I have many thoughts on this.
First, let's look at the example B&C offers as a success story, WCWJ in Jacksonville, which switched up its domain name to the jazzy and vague "YourJax.com" and saw its traffic spike. According to B&C, the rebranded website with its "fresh content like celebrity-focused weekly webisodes and interactive radar" saw its pageviews jump 150% and clicks on banner ads were up 44%.
The problem with this is that "YourJax" didn't replace call letters. The WCWJ website had the equally dorky and generic URL "MyCW17.com" as its online identity. (Go try and type that on a keyboard and you'll see just how awful that really was) So I can see how going from a disastrous domain to a boring/dorky one could improve your hopes of getting some clicks. (And add to that this equally key fact: WCWJ has exactly three years of brand equity in its call letters, which were changed to herald the arrival of the CW network)
I still believe call letters have value, and that value can be transfered from broadcast online, just as a name like The New York Times carries weight at the newsstand and even more weight on my computer.
NBC Local Media's on a call killing campaign with its generic (but NBC-boosting) "NBC New York" and "NBC Bay Area" web identities (which the network has certainly given thought to spreading far and wide, well beyond the O&Os; buying up NBC [CityNameHere] domains in most cities from coast to coast, whether the NBC station's owned by NBC or not) and that serves NBC, but not local stations.
Back to Basics at BZ
There's equity in call letters that have been around for decades. Heard of WBZ? The effort to run away from that local identity in favor of CBS4 was ultimately abandoned. Why? Because folks in Boston know WBZ. It triggers something. "MyClikBoston.com" may be catchy, but it doesn't resonate news. (Oh, damn. There I go again thinking this all has to do with news, instead of entertainment webisodes)
And it's not just me. Robb Lichter, senior VP of new media for LIN stations, told B&C: "The best way to get people to go to the sites is to take the brand they already know." LIN's stations use call letter branding online, and have associated microsites with original branding. "We don't want users to have to go to Google to find us."
How Can We Help You?
Jarvis at CUNY's New Biz Models for Local News
Over the last week, I've attended two lively and inspiring gatherings: a meeting of the Navigating Change Media Think Tank in Connecticut, and the New Business Models for (Local) News Hyper Camp at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism. In both places, I heard the same question: "how can we help you?"
There is a generosity among those of us who are inspired, rather than terrified, by the changes in journalism and media. None of us have this thing figured out, and while there's certainly money to be made for the first ones to get the "answer," it's also simply a time of heightened brain activity. And people want to help. You've got a wild idea? What do you need from us?
Media Big Brain Jeff Jarvis sees the balance shifting, as he writes on his Buzz Machine blog: "the room was filled with people who were, each in his or her own way, building that future and they all recognized that they have to work together to do so. The future of news is also an ecosystem. That’s what became apparent yesterday and that, for me, was the highlight of the event."
And so it is. Rupert Murdoch may want to unplug from Google (best of luck on that), but for the rest of us, the invitations to plug in and connect are limitless. Some of us have ideas, some have connections, some have money. And at Navigating Change and the CUNY Hyper Camp, the cards were exchanged and the ideas were brainstormed. If you're not already in on this, get in on it. If you don't know how, ask me.
How can we help you?
The Local News Business is Changing. Do You Need a Coach?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "Everyone Needs a Coach"
Full disclosure right up front on this one: I have a vested interest in coaching. I draw a salary from the nonprofit Coaching Commons as the site's Community Supported Journalist, where I report on the coaching industry. And I offer coaching and consulting to companies and individuals and advertise those services here on LocalNewser.
That said, I saw a short but powerful video this week on Forbes.com: an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. His take? You, my friend, need a coach.
Watch the interview, and if you agree, head over to CoachReporter, where I'm inviting ideas on getting coaching to all of us, even those of us who have lost news jobs and can't afford to pay full price for a coach like Eric Schmidt's got. Maybe there's another way.
Local Newsers: What's It Going to Be? Innovate or Die? (Huh? You Sure You Don't Want to Pick "Innovate?")
If you haven't yet read Jeff Jarvis' excellent book, What Would Google Do?, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.
Jarvis is a new media guru who produces content across multiple platforms (his BuzzMachine blog is required reading, and his new Guardian podcast is fantastic) and teaches digital media at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism. His book "reverse-engineers" Google to see what secrets we can uncover, and then implement, perhaps fueling a new style of journalism that will keep all of us working into the next decade.
In a discussion of financial models, and how Google transcended them, Jarvis writes: the "winner is likely to be a new player, not one trying to protect old revenue streams and assets." Think about that for a moment. Look at your own company. Is it innovating into the future? Or desperately, blindly, obsessively trying to make what's always worked still work?
In New York last week, News Corp announced its latest round of firings and buyouts, cutting twenty staffers at WNYW and WWOR, cuts that affected traditional news operations and the stations' web team. That jumped out at me. The web, without question, is the future. What does it say about a company making cuts and deciding to pull back on the one area of the business with a clear, huge and critical role in the years ahead?
My answer: they're doing whatever they can do to cut costs and stay alive until the economy improves. Then they'll go back to that internet stuff.
Jeff Jarvis
Jarvis calls this the "Cash Cow in the Coal Mine:" "Cash flow can blind you to the strategic necessity of change, tough decisions, and innovation...How many companies and industries fail to heed the warnings they know are there but refuse to see?"
Local news refuses to see. As Jarvis writes, station owners are losing their "destinies" because they want to "preserve their pasts." And you know it's true. As I've written here, there is incredible innovation happening in the world of video storytelling and news. It's just not being done by television stations. Newspapers are trying new ways of including multimedia content to make their reporting more impactful, interesting and different. In cities across the country, folks are creating web-based newscasts that look nothing like the stuff stations continue to produce--just the way they always have.
Watch this promo for a new Australian newscast that debuts this month. Aside from the cliche-ridden nature of the promo itself, is there anything here that couldn't have been done 25 years ago?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTmNTN5JQXw&feature=player_embedded]
Think about it. What's so different about the six o'clock news? Sure, it starts in some cities at 4. It's shot in HD. And... well, beyond that, it's the same product we've been selling for decades. That reminds me of senior citizens who will buy a new version of the same old car time after time because that's what they like. And looking at the demographics of a lot of news, these are the same reliable viewers keeping some local newscasts alive.
Where's the innovation? What's one new thing that would've been unimaginable to the Action News teams of the 1970's? Doppler radar? That's an improvement of the same old thing. New ways of doing liveshots? What am I missing?
Take the computers out of the newsroom and put typewriters back, replace the cell phones with hard lines, put the AP wire back into a noisy printer in the corner, and go retro with the set, the over-the-shoulder graphics (FIRE!) and men's lapels, and this is the same old cereal in a new box.
It's depressing, when you look at the environment we're in: a once-in-a-career time of change, with a life-or-death incentive to innovate, and yet stations still believe in the tried and true rules of innovation in local news:
1) New Set
2) New Graphics
3) New Anchors
4) New News Director
Seriously, people. News isn't dying. Someone's going to be making money giving our viewers the information they want. But there's no reason to believe it's going to be us.
I guess times are just too tight to risk taking chances. And we'll staff the web team back up when the car dealers start spending again. Sound good? Yeah, that'll work.
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