Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities. Here’s our second installment:
Best Overall News Web Site (circulation 75,000 to 250,000): Knoxnews.com
Knoxville News Sentinel
Entry submitted by:Jack Lail
Managing Editor/Multimedia
Knoxville News Sentinel
(865) 523-3131
Strategy: Knoxnews.com strives to serve our community better than any other news or information source, period.
Innovation: Knoxnews loves to be an innovator, both in step-change and incremental change: Knoxnews was an early beta site for the local channel of the AP Video Network and AP’s local ads for its video player.
Knoxnews added a blog aggregator in late summer, [the site] heavily emphasizes reporter-shot video, and we post video to YouTube and other video sites. Knoxnews invited bloggers to cover us in a open meeting suit. The site also features outbound links to Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. The newspaper is doing a $200,000 business transformation initiative.
Adaptability: From $99 video cameras to $20-a-month social networking sites on Ning to off-the-shelf blogging software, we’re using free and inexpensive tools that any site could replicate.
Impact: Monthly unique visitors are topping 1 million and year-over-year audience growth has been 40 percent in both of the last two years. Video views topped 1 million through the first 10 months of 2007. Early this year, Knoxnews declared war on its local competitors and since then has reversed negative trends in its Hitwise report.
In June, Knoxnews.com went into a new, Django-based content management system with a new design that is more interactive, with user comments, more SEO-friendly and has an admin interface that makes it easier to train newsroom journalists to add stories and photos and do site admin.
Breaking news is a heavy emphasis for the site and we pride ourselves on getting it first and right. We monitor e-mail alerts of all competitors.