The Out-of-Towners   

For many local news sites, a good chunk of readers don’t live around here anymore.

Before the Internet, people had access to their own hometown news. Today consumers have a new, popular choice: other people's local news.

In May, a study of eight newspaper Web sites commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America reported that about 25 percent of visitors come from outside the papers' circulation areas. For some that number was significantly higher – in one case, 52 percent. Registration data collected by other sites echo these findings.

Rusty Coats, director of new media at MORI Research, the firm that produced the report for the NAA, says social mobility is one reason people are shopping for local news outside their own markets. They're interested in the places they've been and the places they're going. Snowbirds like to keep up with the news back home; alums follow their college football teams.

Another reason is that today's surfers seek hometown coverage of national stories. "With the Chandra Levy thing happening, you can't say unequivocally that the Modesto Bee has the best coverage," Coats says, "but people want to see how the local media were covering that story."

Others might not go looking for local sites, but portals such as Google News, Yahoo! News and AOL News will take them by the hand and lead them there. By aggregating links to numerous sites, these services funnel thousands of people to local newspaper and broadcast Web sites they'd never have thought to check. In the information-without-borders, global-marketplace-of-ideas sense, we're just beginning to understand the exciting possibilities for journalism and news users. But what does a large population of interlopers mean to an individual local news operation? Strategically speaking, in a business that increasingly values audience demographics over simple server hits, do out-of-market eyeballs matter?

"You'll hear decided voices that no, [out-of-market visitors] don't matter anything to us because we're all about local consumers and local advertising," Coats says. "This just reflects how early it is; we're not speaking with the same voice about whether these people are important or not."

The question is a no-brainer for the Washington Post, which has the dominant news site in the D.C. area (according to The Media Audit, March-April 2002) and the eighth most popular news site in the U.S. (Nielsen//NetRatings, August 2002). "In print, it's a regional product. Online, it's a national and international readership," explains Mark Stencel, vice president of multimedia and global ventures at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

About 80 percent of washingtonpost.com users are from outside the paper's circulation area, Stencel says. "We're fortunate that we have diverse business opportunities--in our traditional market, in terms of locally oriented advertising, and in giant news markets nationally and internationally."

But other sites are not like washingtonpost.com, with its affluent, mobile readership and savvy ad clients. To a local Web site that offers its content for free and subsists on local classifieds and advertising, out-of-market traffic can look like empty calories--or worse. If a quarter of a site's visitors are from outside the market, that's 25 percent of its bandwidth. These extra people consume staff time when they join moderated discussions and send e-mail that must be answered. And they can skew the site's traffic reports by exaggerating the importance of a particular feature.

That's a provincial, short-sighted view, however--and a waste of energy. Web sites are stuck with their out-of-town guests, so they might as well make lemonade.

One strategy is to pitch advertising deals to local tourism or e-commerce businesses that target nonresidents with an interest in local events or merchandise. And if outsiders consistently choose a particular type of content, there's an opportunity for enterprise--if not today, then down the road, when online payments are more routine. In October the Columbus Dispatch started charging nonprint subscribers $4.95 per month for online access. One of the reasons was that more than half of Dispatch.com's registered users come from outside of Ohio, many for popular Buckeyes sports coverage.

"Look in the mirror and say, 'Can I charge for this, and do I do this better than anyone else?' " suggests Coats. "Does the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel do Packer coverage better than ESPN? You bet your ass they do."

For local news organizations, local audiences and advertisers should be top priority. But it also can be healthy to cultivate an out-of-market audience that may prove just as loyal and rewarding. Original, interesting local content covers both bases.