Seeing the Sites   

So startups are going belly-up. That doesn’t mean that online content is dead. Far from it. Squarely here to stay are newspapers, nearly all of which have developed some online presence in recent years to expand their brand of newsgathering. We’ve talked to the online operations of six newspapers--some big, some small, from different areas of the country--to find out about what they’ve built in a relatively short time. (The veterans, after all, have been at this for a whopping five years or so.) What’s popular? Who’s reading? And is the print side still suspicious? Read on for a snapshot of what’s going on behind the screens.

Chat City
The Washington Post Site:
www.washingtonpost.com
Launched in June 1996

What you'll notice: Extensive online discussion opportunities with staff and special guests. Everyone from real-estate writer Daniela Deane to "Sopranos" star Dominic "Uncle Junior" Chianese has appeared in the hour-long online chats. Each week some 50 forums are offered. "We are not just the newspaper online," says Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive spokesman Don Marshall. "Our mission, as we like to say, is to become a place of community." Hosting so many online chats supports that goal, because it gives readers a chance to talk and connect to the people who write for the paper, as well as names in the news. Where else could you exchange witty repartee with gossip columnist Lloyd Grove or discuss the ins and outs of the McVeigh execution with Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating? Political correspondent Charles Babington, who produces online-only copy as well as print pieces, has fielded queries in his weekly chat segment about the Florida recount, potential candidates for the U.S. ambassador post to Italy and the shift of power in Congress. "I enjoy it, and it's just one hour," Babington says of his Friday afternoon "Political Insider" chat.

Staff: Between 260 and 275 people work at Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive, headquartered in suburban Virginia, a few subway stops away from the Post's print headquarters. (That includes support staff, human resources and other noneditorial employees; the company won't say how many of those employees work directly with content.)

The basics: Every story that appears in the paper appears online. In addition to seven or so specific stories blurbed on the homepage, there are links to each section. The homepage also links to themed politics, entertainment, classifieds and job pages, as well as "CameraWorks," a photo site that includes photos of the day, photo archives and "Best of the Post," often featuring video or elaborate slide-show galleries.

Ch-ch-changes: The washingtonpost.com homepage was redesigned in late 1999 to "lighten up" the page, says Marshall. "They didn't want one that they had to scroll down forever to get to things. We established channels"--they look like page tabs or file folders across the top of the homepage--"to allow people to get to overarching topics." The newest feature of the site is mywashingtonpost. com, which allows readers to customize their Post page.

Who's reading: Babington notes that unlike chief competitors the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, the Post doesn't circulate nationally--except online.
"Now more than 50 percent--and I've seen figures as high as 70 percent--of readers of washingtonpost. com live outside the Washington Post circulation area," Babington says.
What are visitors looking for? "Beyond news (which is obviously the most popular part of our site), the largest share of page views go to our classified offerings, most notably WashingtonJobs. com, our career management site, and our car information and listings," Marshall says. "And of course, comics and horoscopes also generally rank very high in terms of daily views." Mywashingtonpost.com is also seeing significant traffic, as do the chats and CameraWorks, especially when big news hits.

Of buy-in and other hurdles: The Monica Lewinsky scandal, with its revelation-a-minute news cycle, helped suspicious Posties on the print side see the value of Internet journalism, washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Douglas Feaver says. (For one thing, reporters found that posting early versions of stories sometimes prompted calls and tips from sources--and helped shape an even stronger piece for the next day's paper.) But Feaver, a 32-year Post veteran, remembers another pivotal moment in linking the print side with the online version. In 1999, Feaver and Post Managing Editor Steve Coll went around the print newsroom to help launch what would become an afternoon update of the site, dubbed PM Extra. They went to the national staff first, talking about how reporters would only need to file a few stories of 6 to 8 inches apiece. None other than esteemed political writer and columnist David Broder (now teaching journalism at the University of Maryland) stood up, Feaver remembers. "He said, 'You're asking for six stories of 6 inches each?' And we said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'You're not asking for very much.' Broder saying that sent an enormously strong message."

How often is it updated? Essentially, as news warrants. The first edition of the next day's paper is available online at 11 p.m. Eastern time, and the final goes up around 6 a.m. The Web-only PM Extra edition fully updates the homepage at 1 p.m.

The biz end of things: The Post is mum other than to say its online operations are not turning a profit.

Did you say staff? There's no special Web staff at the News: Managing Editor Gregory Enns is also the online director, and section editors, reporters and copy editors post the stories. "It was difficult at first," Enns says of adding on another layer of responsibility in the newsroom. "It's hard in these times to justify hiring new staff, so we just kind of realized we had to incorporate this. Even the editorial person posts the editorials and the letters." The upside? Since there's no separate staff cordoned off in a different office, there's real synergy between print and online content at the News.

The basics: The homepage features highlights from news and sports. Most stories are posted.

The extras: A daily Web poll on a newsy issue. On a few occasions, the site has posted source material: In early k June, a sports reporter discovered that a University of Alabama assistant football coach had gotten a mortgage from a booster and was being investigated by the NCAA. "Our reporter had obtained the mortgage, so we put the mortgage on the Web site," Enns says. "We led the site with the story and put the deed right up there on the homepage." Breaking news is posted occasionally, too.

Who's reading: Sports fans, sports fans and more sports fans. (That's Crimson Tide fans, of course.) "One of the highest traffic days came in February, when the NCAA issued a preliminary letter of inquiry into the University of Alabama's recruiting practices," Enns says. "We put it on at noon and posted the text of the letter, and we got 17,000 hits."

Measuring your progress: When a reporter's story gets lots of hits, Enns passes along the news. "The guy who did the NCAA story on the deed to the coach--the site that day got 11,000 hits. I let him know."

Staff, schmaff: The lack of additional staff isn't stopping the News from acting on its Web readers' biggest interest. It's launching a new site (www.tidesports. com) devoted exclusively to Crimson Tide sports news. "There's about 140,000 University of Alabama alumni, and most aren't in Tuscaloosa," Enns points out.
So are they making money? Not yet, although Enns says that the site is "approaching" profitability.

Buy-in of a different sort: Coloradoan.com has been profitable since March 2001, in part because of its links to several revenue-producing sites that let viewers buy a car or rent an apartment online. In fact, the site won a Colorado Press Association award for its revenue generation, based on the number of its advertisers. (The company won't say exactly how many or what its profits are, although non-classified online ads represent 10 percent of the paper's total ad base.) Some of the differences on the Web site--banner ads on the equivalent of the front page--raised eyebrows on the print side at the outset, says online director Chris Pomeroy. "There's that kind of proverbial wall between advertising and editorial. We sort of have to straddle that fence.... We have to make it work for both sides," he says. "Banners on the front page was a shocker for [the newsroom] at first. But, case in point, there are now advertisements on the front page of the print edition as well. It's more of an overall resistance to change."

Staff: Five--in addition to Pomeroy, there are two online coordinators who maintain the site, a content editor and a salesperson who serves as a liaison to the newsroom.

The basics: The Coloradoan's homepage features news, sports, business and life and entertainment headers with a top story under each, as well as a link to more stories from that day's paper. There's a link to the AP newswire. Banner ads and links to movie times, subscription forms for the newspaper and area directories dominate the top of the frame.

The extras: You can read archived "special reports" on wildfires, new police recruits and water needs--newspaper staff stories on these topics that have been collected and massed in one location by online content editor Kate Forgach. There are also links to Census, health and government databases. Forgach oversees the links and finds much of the original source material. "When the Supreme Court handed down its decision on the presidential race," she says, "there was so much traffic that day I knew it would take forever if we linked to the Supreme Court site. So I had to find an alternative way for them to get the actual text of the decision. I found it at the Cornell School of Law and I linked to that." She also works with the print side to produce special features, such as a day-in-the-life-of-an-election project featuring 17 hours of constantly updated coverage.

Who's reading: "Our audience tends to be the high-technology people who log in from work, people who have moved away and people who live outside our area," Forgach says. "They're interested in what I call gossip- factor stories: accidents. Sports is very important. They're not as interested in the more feature-y stories, so I don't take up our [homepage allotment of] five news stories with that. There's also less interest in stories like the Census results, so I put those on a separate site so they can go to that if they want."

Of buy-in and other issues: "There was quite a lot of education that had to go on," Pomeroy remembers. "There was the whole fear factor, the barnacle theory--that we were leeching on to steal the revenue and give away the news for free, the whole men-in-black theory. Number one, we've helped to educate them.... Number two, they're seeing it out there. The younger staff has always had this. It's definitely become less of a leech mentality. News is information, whether you get it on your doorstep or on your computer." What also helped: a content management system that means stories can be posted in less than 15 minutes.

The news cycle: The paper is posted--"barring all major catastrophes," says Pomeroy--by 3 a.m.

The Mercury News (motto: "The Newspaper of Silicon Valley") was the first newspaper to put all of its content on the Web, says team leader Pamela Moreland.

Beating deadline and other joys: "One night the Giants game went 19 innings; it went 5 hours. There's no way that the sports section was going to get that story into all editions," Moreland says. "But I said, 'Hey, I'm here, I'll get the whole story up.' You can put a tagline into the section that says, 'For the entire results, check the Web site.' That kind of deadline pressure, we can just laugh at. I posted the story at 1:20 a.m."

What, no www.mercurynews.com? Over the past three years, Knight Ridder's Internet division has established uniform "city pages" in many of its locales. So in San Jose, to find the Mercury News you first click on bayarea. com, which features repackaged Mercury News sports, entertainment and news content, a link to Knight Ridder's nearby Contra Costa Times--and advertising.
Knight Ridder Digital's goal "is to create a city page, or guide, to each of the areas it has papers in, and have it uniform. That way they can sell [national] advertising," Moreland explains. "So, if I'm AT&T and I want to buy a position, I can buy it for each of the city pages and have it in the same position." Whether that strategy is working or not financially isn't clear: Knight Ridder doesn't break out profits for newspaper Web sites since that change has taken place, a company executive says.

Staff: Three in-the-newsroom staffers, none of whom produce content. The cost of online-only reporters is difficult to justify, Moreland says, especially in a tight economic climate. "If you've got great reporters [in the print newsroom], you want to use them."

The basics: The Mercury News' homepage includes links to a handful of major news, business, arts and sports stories. A smaller rail of links on the left takes readers to themed section fronts and Spanish- and Vietnamese-language versions of the site. As you might expect, technology coverage is thorough and wide-ranging: Click on the "Technology" link and you'll go to SiliconValley.com, a collection of wire and Merc stories and original content managed by a separate Knight Ridder staff. It includes news, opinion columns and lifestyle-related stories such as home sales information and updates on airport access.
There are also technology-related forums, such as "Down in the Valley," a companion to a Mercury News series on the industry's recession and its ripple effects. And there's some Web-only content, such as Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor's Weblog, and a daily roundup of technology news called Good Morning Silicon Valley.

The extras: You can sign up for e-mail alerts about blackouts. Breaking news offers the best of the AP and Reuters, with occasional dispatches from staff.

A day in the life: Moreland launches the site from home with the first round of news at 7 a.m. The breaking news area is updated every hour or so, through midnight. In the afternoon, the main part of the site is updated with fresh news, some from blurbs from Mercury News print reporters. In all, Moreland says, the site gets a major overhaul two to three times a day.

Who's reading: "The online audience is very demanding," Moreland says. "This is personal, almost like TV. I've had people e-mail me because they can't find Ann Landers, and they expect you to e-mail them back.... I think once they know your site, they come back for special things." She sees the readership base as an amalgam of current and former San Jose residents and, frankly, other journalists, who are checking out the site as competition.

Print vs. online: Although you can click on an icon to view an image of the print version of the Mercury News, the top online news stories don't always match those in the paper. "On today's 1A there's a story about a high-tech repo man. It's a great story, but I put it on the biz cell, because we had a story out of Washington about a congressional hearing on the power crisis in California.... We have discretion to do that kind of thing, since we don't have a front page; we don't have 'above the fold' and 'below the fold.' " Online staffers tweak headlines for the Web site, because often a headline in the paper worked because it was packaged with a photo or other explanatory pieces. The single-line teaser on a Web site needs to be more straightforward.

On being online in a tech-savvy community: "The expectations are so high...but I love that kind of pressure. We should be linking to other sites more often, and if a music writer writes about some folk singer, we should be able to provide a link and an audio clip," Moreland says. She came to the Mercury News from California's Marin Independent Journal, which posted five to eight stories each day and didn't update until the following day. "That just wouldn't fly in San Jose. People come back, and they want to see fresh stories."

All the news that's quick to print: The site is updated every 10 minutes.

Staff: About 250 people work at New York Times Digital, which in addition to the Times' Web site also operates boston.com and other company sites. Between 30 and 40 of those staffers work directly with content for nytimes.com, estimates Associate Editor Meredith Artley. NYT Digital's offices are five blocks from the main Times building.

The basics: Dozens and dozens of links on the Times' homepage take readers to national, international, business, arts, sports and politics stories. Every story from the Times' national edition appears on the site.

The extras: Free e-mail news bulletins for subscribers and breaking news alerts on the site itself (a headline that's up for a few minutes until a short story can be written and linked to). There are special slide-show photo galleries on topics such as the "Subway Series" and photographer Steve Schapiro's images of the 1960s. Extensive archives let readers peruse the paper's award-winning race series or check out the Tony winners. There's a link to the New York Times Learning Network, a site designed for students and teachers in grades three through 12 based on the paper's content. For example, on a day in which the centerpiece was a Times story about automated mapping of human behavior, there was a suggested accompanying lesson plan focused on managing stressful situations. Elsewhere, there are video tours of Gotham's restaurants (to console readers about that unattainable reservation, perhaps).

Who's reading: Times studies show online readers are typically younger than print readers, but not by much--about 44 versus 45--and slightly more often male. But that doesn't play into editorial decisions that much, Artley says. "I don't know if we think about the audience being that different. There are people who read the newspaper and people who read the Web site, and a lot of times they're the same person." Because the New York Times is such a recognizable brand name, Artley says, the online side's focus is to make sure the site reflects the latest news that "is of New York Times quality." That means that getting staff bylines is even more important, she notes. "You can get rewritten wire stories in a lot of places. We assume people are coming to see New York Times-quality news. There'll be several times over the course of a week or even a day when we will call [the print newsroom] up and ask for a recent story on the latest Supreme Court decision, and they can track down Linda Greenhouse, who will file us a Web version."

Keeping track of the audience: Artley says the online staff regularly reports to its print counterparts about page views and big-hit stories. And those are welcome dispatches: "I worked on the race series that ran in the paper over a year ago (see "Black and White in Color," October 2000), and they actually came to us first. They said, 'Make sure you give us the numbers, tell us how many people are reading the articles, who's joining in discussions on the forum. We want to see those numbers.' And that was great, that they were enthused to find out."

It's the new nytimes. com: In July the Times launched a redesign of the site for smoother navigation. The site is a work in progress, Artley says. "It's all about traffic," she says. "You can see right away what readers are drawn to. I think it's just experimentation: Do readers really want video, or do slide shows work just as well?" Bells and whistles notwithstanding, what's most popular with readers is straight-up news: national, business, international, AP (wire stories and breaking news) and some technology, says New York Times Digital spokeswoman Christine Mohan.

Fulfilling expectations: Does the online staff feel pressure to live up to the cachet the Times has in the print world? "I don't know if I'd call it pressure," Artley says. "I feel like it's just part of the job. You would assume that one wants to do the best one can, and put out the best product. Sure, I guess we have the weight of the New York Times behind that, so it makes it feel a little bit more important. But it's really just part of the job."

The moolah (and the future): New York Times Digital says the division will be profitable by 2002 at the latest.

The nervousness factor: "At first they put up a smaller version of the daily news, basically," says Ted Williams, managing producer, who joined the Web site after the Pennsylvania paper was acquired by the Tribune Co. last year. "There wasn't a lot of interactivity in the beginning. Newspapers this size still have the same feeling--it's a very parochial area, very traditional market. There are still people who work here who are still very concerned about putting stories up on the Web."

Staff: Three Web producers and an online director, working in the newsroom. "Essentially we sit down there and try to be as unobtrusive as we can," says Williams. "We don't want to be pushing it down their throats." (But Web staffers do attend the daily news meetings.)

The basics: The homepage features headlined links to four or five main news stories and some national and sports news. A rail of links down the left side leads readers to the rest of the paper's news and features, as well as national and world stories courtesy of the Associated Press, classifieds and the editorial page.
PhotoJournal includes the best of the photos from each day's paper. My-goguide.com, a specially structured entertainment guide, allows viewers to click on any day of a monthlong calendar and find out what events are scheduled.

The extras: There's a daily Web poll on current issues. Stories from other Tribune Co. papers are used to update the site--a boon to a medium-circulation paper, which can then feature content different from the AP copy many other sites rely on, without expanding staff. "If something breaks, one of the bigger papers obviously has more resources," Williams says. "It's like having our own wire service." And there's a database feature on county assessments that won the site a Society of Professional Journalists award.

Who's reading: The majority of mcall.com's users are from the Lehigh Valley, Williams says.

Timing: Content is put online automatically at 4 or 5 a.m. A producer arrives at 6 a.m. to fix any glitches that may have occurred, and staffers update the site as news warrants throughout the day. Almost all postings are from print staffers: A double murder netted a news bulletin. Sometimes reporters ask why they should pursue a story if it's going to be posted before it appears in the paper, Williams says. "I guess the answer to that is that if it's something that TV is going to get, people are going to know about it anyway," he says. "The problem is when we have a really great story, when we think we have an exclusive but we're not sure. You don't want to give the competition a jump on the story."

It's not just the newsroom: In the same way that it took time to get buy-in from print side folks, advertisers are also somewhat wary, Williams says. But having concrete, measurable numbers in terms of page views may someday help that cause. "You can say, 'This many people are seeing the page.' You can show that as a real return." One advertiser ran a coupon on the paper's Web site and was pleasantly surprised that shoppers showed up at the store with the coupon. Still, "it's taking its time. And all these people hearing horror stories [about Web sites folding] is making people more hesitant." Even so, the Web site is making money: It's been profitable since 1999, Williams says.