Audience Building Initiative: Online Community at the Racine Journal Times

Audience Building Initiatives

Introduction

This series of case studies showcases both operational excellence and initiatives that have successfully increase audience for newspaper Web sites.

Introduction

Audience Building Initiative: Online Community at the Racine Journal Times

By Rich Gordon

Summary

The Racine (Wis.) Journal Times (print circulation 28,000 daily, 30,000 Sunday) built an active online community by offering Web site users the opportunity to comment on the news. Using simple (and free, open source) technology, the paper's journalists have posted content, solicited user comments and managed user interaction to keep conversations lively and on track.

In 2007, the “News and Views Weblogs” section on journaltimes.com has been averaging more than 200 user comments a day. As user participation grew, so did the paper's Web site traffic. In just two years, the number of online users who visit the site regularly (once a week or more) more than doubled, and monthly page views more than tripled. In late July, the Journal Times rolled out a new online community platform that's intended to increase user participation even more.

History of this initiative

Like many papers, the Times began experimenting with staff Weblogs in 2004. As of early May 2005, one reporter, Rob Golub, was writing what he describes as a “quirky” blog for the site, entitled “Rob on the Road.” Traffic to the blog was growing, and users were posting comments. City Editor Dustin Block was a leader in pushing to expand blogging on the site.

“It wasn't exactly a groundbreaking idea,” Block said. “I was using sites as models that I went to on a regular basis myself, like Daily Kos, Fark and BoingBoing. The way they were using the readers to provide content, with a small staff — that seemed kind of appealing to me.”

The paper's then-editor, Randy Brandt, was interested in finding ways to grow the site's traffic. In the paper's print edition, Brandt had increased reader engagement by applying audience-building recommendations from the Readership Institute at Northwestern University. He read a report from the Readership Institute suggesting that news sites create a "Talk about it" Web site for people to engage with and comment on the news. This recommendation was based on Readership Institute research that suggests the “gives me something to talk about” experience is one of the most powerful drivers of newspaper and Web site usage.

“I realized that not only could we give people something to talk about, we could provide the forum for them to talk about it,” recalled Brandt, who left the Journal Times in June 2007. “Interactivity and addictiveness could be such a powerful driver for audience.”

Brandt, Block and their team decided to create several new blogs and use them as a platform for publishing news — stories from the paper, updates during the day, and more. While the underlying technology (an open-source program called Nucleus) is typically used to create blogs, the paper used the software more along the lines of a news publishing system. After a news item was posted, users had an opportunity to comment.

The paper also created an area on the top of the home page (labeled "News and Views") to highlight the new blogs, and began specifically inviting people on the Web site to comment in those posts. One blog was devoted to a regular feature called “Debatables,” which invited people to argue opposite sides of an issue.

The first thing that happened was that people started to post comments. The number of reader comments rose like this:

Coincidentally, in July and August 2005, Belden Associates, a research firm working for the newspaper was conducting an online survey of users of Journaltimes.com. Site visitors were randomly invited to take an online survey and have a chance to win $1,000.

The results of the survey stunned Belden researchers. Between July and August, the survey suggested, the size of the site's total audience more than doubled, from 40,000 to 89,000 visitors. What's more, the survey indicated that the growth in audience in August was due almost entirely to people who were previously infrequent visitors to the site. (Belden could measure this because the survey asked respondents how many days they had visited the site in the previous week. The survey found a huge surge in the number of people who said this — the day they took the survey — was the first day they had visited the site in the past week.)

“I thought it was pretty astonishing,” said Greg Harmon, director of interactive for Belden. “We were very concerned about the jump in estimated use and reach because it was so dramatic. I looked for other explanations. We told Racine that you can't use the August figures for marketing and ad sales because you don't know if they're going to hold up and you can't over promise the [advertising] clients. … We assumed these folks would go away.”

A year later, in August 2006, The Journal Times hired Belden to repeat the survey. The new visitors had not gone away. The site's "core audience" — a term Belden uses to describe people who had visited the site at least once in a seven-day period — was more than double what they'd found in 2005. In a year's time, the core audience rose from 9,000 to 21,000 people.

“That really blew my mind,” Harmon said. “What I thought was truly astonishing about this was that they were growing the core audience. That's something I'd never seen before. Typically, audiences don't grow 100 percent in a year.”

Not surprisingly, the number of page views on the site also rose dramatically:

A key development was a shooting incident in January of 2006, in which a man named Adrial White was convicted of murder and attempted murder for shooting three young men he caught breaking into a car. The case generated strong feelings in Racine, with some people contending the shootings were justified. Readers posted hundreds of comments about the case on the Journal Times Web site.

While there is no more recent Belden data, Web site server logs indicate that since August 2006 the audience for the site remained relatively stable at about 3 million page views per month. But the number of comments has continued to grow.

Belden's survey also asked site visitors what brought them to the site that day. At many sites, a common answer is, “I like to check up on yesterday's news,” Harmon said.

“When you look through the Racine comments, what I noticed most was the ones that said they came ‘to find out what's happening now' or ‘what's going on,'” Harmon said. “It went from being yesterday's news, a repurposed-content site, to a place where people have a real dynamic sense of what's happening now.”

How it works

The Journal Times integrated “News and Views” into the operation of the newsroom. Golub, who is now Web editor, played a leading role in deciding what stories to post and where on the site to post them. But reporters and other editors also posted items. Furthermore, the paper launched several blogs devoted to traditional newsroom operations: letters to the editor, editorials, and some of the paper's featured columnists.

The blogs also served as a home for breaking news. “When it works well, it's like a wire service,” said Block, the city editor. “You post a blurb or an alert, then you follow up and make some calls and update the story.”

The paper has experimented with different kinds of blogs. Based on user comments, the most popular one was “Racine Report,” which focuses on news from the paper's home city. Other popular blogs included “Beyond Wisconsin” (news from the nation and world) “Cheese-o-Sphere” (state news, with a tagline of “The Cheesy Center of it All”) and “Schools Report” (education). The paper also published a blog on parenting called “Mommy Talk” and several devoted to sports.

“We've had very little trouble getting reporters to buy into this,” Block said. “I suspect it's because we've so integrated it into the regular news operation. We're just making it part of the job, and everyone realizes it can help them to see what people are interested in and responding to.”

The paper made it very easy for online users to post comments. No site registration was required, and comments went live immediately, without prior review by staff.

“Turning the site over to the user as much as possible is the key,” said Golub, the Web editor. “Our role is just to get out of the way. Getting out of the way means lowering barriers to the public, not having complex signup, not having it be difficult to post something.”

While larger sites such as The Washington Post have struggled to manage online comments and keep discussions from deteriorating, that has not been a serious issue in Racine, Golub said. The site simply invited users offended by a comment to “Suggest a Weblog comment for removal.” Such a suggestion generates an email to about 10 Journal Times staff members, any of whom has the ability to remove an objectionable post. Golub says “a few comments a day” are typically removed.

When a comment is removed, here's what appears in its place:

(DELETED: This comment was reported to The Journal Times and we have erased it. We reserve the right to ban users without warning if they abuse our comment system. We have the ability to ban individual computers from posting comments. -Editors)

“In a community of this size, it seems to manage itself,” Brandt said. “We take comments down that we think are abusive or racist or obscene. But the overwhelming majority of people do behave. They warn each other to keep the conversation reasonably civil. They enjoy the interaction and don't want it taken away.”

The mayor of Racine reads the “Racine Report” blog and responds to complaints about city government. One evening, “our mayor logged on and had a community debate with people all night,” Brandt said. “It started out very rough, but he did a very good job and at the end people thanked the mayor and thanked us for providing the community forum. It was quite gratifying.”

The site has also experimented with “Open Thread” posts – inviting people to comment on absolutely anything they may be interested in. Block said he borrowed this concept from other popular blogs. While these posts were among the most likely to generate objectionable comments, they have proven very popular.

“People just want a place to connect a bit and they can write anything and see where things go,” Block said. “It's a little bit humbling from a newspaper's perspective. … They take us out of the equation.”

Promotion and connections to print

The paper prominently highlights its URL in print – about 20 percent of the front-page banner is devoted to the Web address, Golub said. Beyond that, the print edition will mention topics that people can comment on. The editors will also periodically publish a story about comments that have been posted online about a particular topic.

“We'll gather selected comments and run them in the paper, with a couple of paragraphs on top saying, ‘Here are some comments on JournalTimes.com,'” Golub said.

Print features such as letters to the editor, editorials and “Glad You Asked That,” which invites readers to ask questions that the staff can find answers to, also direct people to a corresponding blog on the Web site.

About the technology

Nucleus is open-source blog software, freely available for download on the Internet. It was installed on the Journal Times Web site as part of a site redesign in early 2005. The installation was led by staff members from the Journal Times as well as its corporate parent, Lee Enterprises, Golub said.

The new online community platform launched in July was built using software from two separate companies: The Port for blogging, personalization and social networking capabilities, and VMIX for video publishing and sharing.

Jeff Herr, director of interactive media for Lee Enterprises, said the company plans to deploy these tools on other Lee sites as well.

About revenue

By driving more traffic, “News and Views” has played a substantial role in helping the Journal Times increase its online advertising revenue. Rick Parrish, the paper's advertising director, said online banner revenue – primarily driven by banners on “News and Views” – rose 69 percent from April 2006 to April 2007. “We are clearly growing revenue creatively and rapidly,” Parrish said.

What's next

The Journal Times' new community platform is more fully integrated with the rest of the newspaper's Web site than the original one powered by open-source software. It also gives users considerably more power to publish content. In the original system, users were mostly limited to commenting on posts made by the newspaper staff. The new system invites users to create their own blogs and to submit and share photos and video as well as text.

The new functionality, Golub said, will allow people in Racine to interact with one another in much the same way that users of social networking sites such as MySpace do.

“Our new presentation will be an alternative to MySpace, a different experience that is not a replacement for MySpace, just different,” Golub said in an email interview. “On MySpace, you can pretend you're friends with someone in another country. It's a fantasy. On our site, your friends will be your neighbors. It's real.”

One other change with the new system is that for the first time, users must register if they want to comment.

“Requiring light registration but allowing posting without approval will serve as a very low barrier to entry,” Golub said. “It should reel in our abusive users but still allow unfettered access. We hope the new content will make up for the new, relatively
mild barrier.”

Block wants to start coaching and teaching contributors to post news themselves. “I think people really want to be involved with the paper, and they enjoy it, and I don't think we've really tapped that yet,” he said. “I think the comments are a start, but if we do a little better job of teaching, we could really affect the local news. … If we could get our best commenters and direct them, it would really change things. That's where I hope things go.”

Lessons from the Journal Times's experience

• Inviting user comments is one of the easiest, fastest and least expensive ways to build online audience. All the Journal Times had to do was install free software and invite user comments.
• A small paper can cultivate interaction with the community without disrupting newsroom operations. In a community the size of Racine, something like “News and Views” can be integrated into the way the newsroom works.
• Make it easy for users to comment. Anything that makes it difficult – online registration, complex procedures – will inhibit participation. “It needs to be easy so grandma can do it,” Golub said.
• Unpleasant comments are inevitable, but a reasonable tradeoff if you want user participation. “It's kind of, ‘no pain, no gain,'” Golub said. “If you want to generate a lot of traffic, you need to live with the uncertainty of what people are going to post.”
• When big news breaks, the combination of Web and print is powerful. The Adrial White case “drove Internet audience, and we also had some of our best single-copy sales numbers,” Brandt said. “The Internet was not drawing away from the newspaper in any way, it was adding and fueling.”
• Encourage creativity, and allow room for failure. “Fear kills initiative, and there's going to be a certain amount of risk,” Block said. “Instead of looking for reasons not to try things, you should take initiative. … Fail or succeed, you can build a culture of people who want to try new things. You just have to reward the risk and not punish the failure.”

Relevant links

• Racine Journal Times Weblogs home page
• Most commented-upon posts
• Readership Institute Web site
• “Talk About It” Web site paper
• Nucleus open-source blog platform

About the author

Rich Gordon is an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. Prof. Gordon directs the school's graduate program in Web publishing. For the 2006-07 academic year, he has taken on a special assignment as director of digital media in education. He began his professional career at the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, and later worked at The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post and The Miami Herald, where he became the company's first new media director. In addition to teaching and research about new media journalism, Rich has served as a consultant for the Newspaper Association of America, Pulitzer Newspapers and Grainger Corp. He speaks regularly to professional and industry groups.

Audience Data and Media Usage

Media Usage: A Generational Perspective
Ball State Middletown Media Studies
Pew Internet and American Life Project
State of the News Media 2005
Center for Media Research
U.S. Census Bureau Press Releases
Carnegie Corporation: Abandoning the News
Ketchum: National Survey of Women
BLS: American Time Use Survey

First Published:
August 29, 2007

Resources Toolbox