Recently, I heard a particularly illuminating comment by a news director from another market about their website that perfectly encapsulates the kind of pervasive mindset that desperately needs to be changed.
To paraphrase, he said that the only reason they have a website is "because our competitors do." He complained that the site doesn't bring in any real revenue and as a result, he feels no need to spend additional station resources to improve their online presence.
It is absolutely imperative that we develop a quality online experience for our viewership that isn't simply an afterthought of the day's news. And while many stations spin a good yarn about commitment to the web and emerging web technologies, far too often in my limited experience does this phrase translate in real life to little more than making sure stories are uploaded during the day along with maybe a grainy cellphone photo. A commitment to the web goes far beyond web updates alone.
There are several important steps that should be considered by a station or station group to improve their website, which will require a significant allocation of resources. A site re-design from the ground up beats a
Web CMS widely in use (i.e. Worldnow) any day. While such an expenditure for an individual station's use is not very practical, station group owners should think long-term and put together web assets that can be shared across their ownership group.
Still, there are also several steps which can potentially be integrated within a current web framework, regardless if it's a CMS or not. So without further ado, here are the ten commandments that can help achieve a better web presence online that in many cases can be utilized without a significant overhaul to the current web framework.
Commandment #1 - Thou Shalt Use Tags/Labels/KeywordsExamples:
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Ars Technica-
Politico-
The Daily ShowA station that doesn't do its demographic research is a station waiting to fold. So it should be fairly obvious to say that the visitors to your website care about different topics of interest. If they can find stories they care about on your site more easily than on those of your competitors, you're going to increase market share. One way you can accomplish this is by using tags attached to each of your stories.
Tags are commonly used keywords that can be attached to an entry that can be searched for later. You can find tags on pretty much every blog out there (even this site) and on some of the better online news sites.
Take a look at the examples above, with
Ars Technica being the model you should try to emulate. The main page contains stories from all kinds of categories. If you'll notice, each story has a category tag associated with it (Apple - Infinite Loop, Business - Uptime). Clicking on either the category tag on the story or from the navigation bar at the top filters your story search for what you truly care about. The site recognizes that people who have an Apple computer might not care about what Microsoft has to say.
In all seriousness,
The Daily Show had a tremendous challenge in organizing and sorting over ten years of episodes that are available on their website. Their web team did a magnificent job of adding keywords to their episodes to help organize the content and aid visitors in finding the episode or part of an episode that they are looking for.
We should apply the same logic to our news websites and allow users to filter the news they want to see. A teacher might be more interested in school stories than crime, or a resident living in a tough area might favor crime stories around their area. Where Ars Technica has "Apple, Business, Gadgets, Gaming, Hardware, Microsoft" at the top navigational bar, news websites should pick the most common category tags and make a similar navigational bar such as "Crime, Schools, Courts, Community, Economy, Politics" or whatever categories you think best fits your market.
You might be asking yourself, "My website already has a search function that searches for text within stories. Isn't that good enough?"
The purpose of a search button is to locate a specific item, not necessarily to browse through related stories. For example, a visitor might be interested in crime, but a typical story about an aggravated assault might not actually have the word "crime" in it. Also, if someone is interested in school stories, it's not exactly user-friendly to make them type in "Killeen school" every time they want to filter results.
Remember: this is a competition, and the easier you make it for users to sort and find the information that matters to them, the more visitors you will attract to your website.
Commandment #2 - Thou Shalt Use High Quality VideoExamples:
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Vimeo-
SmugMug-
YouTube-
CollegeHumor-
Wikipedia's List of Video Sharing WebsitesWith broadband Internet penetration in most markets reaching a saturation point, there's no excuse for us to only provide low quality video on our websites. Arguments over ensuring dial-up users are not forgotten are definitely valid, but that's a reason to use multiple encodings targeting various bitrates rather than cripple your site for the majority of other viewers. If you're going to only use one encoding for the purposes of simplicity, I'd argue that using higher quality video will net you more total users over the long-run, especially if you can provide better quality video than your competitors.
I'd say a good ballpark for video quality is 320 x 240 pixels at the very least. Anything smaller is not going to cut it. Try to aim for 640 x 480 or a widescreen variant. Some websites use video at a higher resolution but stick the video in a tiny box at the corner of the screen. I mean - c'mon people, our main product is video. Why are we cramping the lifeblood of our industry into a little tiny box at the corner or in some cases not even on the front page at all?
Without a doubt, the best interface I've seen for watching videos is CollegeHumor.com. Ignoring the actual content for a second,
take a look at their interface here:
First off, notice the clean interface, a good ratio of content to advertisement (a point I'll get to later), but more importantly:
- A healthy-sized video player at the top.
- Advertisements in-video are sparse.
- Videos load extremely quickly.
- Videos are encoded in a high-quality format.
- After the video ends, a new one automatically begins, keeping the viewer occupied. If you choose to put ads in-video at the end of each segment, this is the most efficient way to get people to watch ads. They're satisfied by getting immediate gratification on the video they want, and while the next one is queued up, your advertisement plays. Put yourself in the role of a visitor to the site -- do you really want to click on multiple videos when you know the commercial is coming before each one? It's much better to sneak the commercial in after the segment.
In terms of actual news sites, the ABC O&O's like KABC are the best I've seen. Look at KABC's
website for a moment. Notice the large video player at the top, crisp and clean and taking up a good amount of screen real estate but not too much. If you have a talented web team that can actually design a Flash video player, you might want to use this site as an example of what to emulate.
So let's cut to the chase: how should a medium-market television station upgrade their video without significantly altering their web framework? With a relatively low gigabyte limit, CMS systems like WorldNow currently don't provide the most optimal way to deliver video.
Instead, consider using a third-party video distrubution system like Vimeo, YouTube, SmugMug, or any other website that allows embedding videos onto your station's website.
I personally like Vimeo the best, but they do technically say they disallow videos for commercial purposes. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), but if you can make it work with your legal department, try Vimeo. If not, you should jump on the bandwagon of stations using YouTube. YouTube allows the upload of HD videos (just make sure whoever encodes your videos off your editing system knows what they're doing), allows embedding of those videos onto your news site, and gives you an automatic presence on YouTube for people randomly searching for news in your area. Also, by using YouTube you're allowing users to embed your clips onto their websites and blogs thus promoting your website without even doing a thing. And if it's all about the Benjamins, talk to your marketing department about encoding quick 10-15 second ads when you upload and if advertisers would go for it. Maybe bring up
this article if you want to help make your point.
But remember, you need to think long-term. Take advantage of this transition period when ad revenue from Internet in-video advertisements aren't considered nearly as important as ad revenue from the actual television broadcast. Your primary goal should be to increase market share by providing a superior online video experience than your competitors. If you look at the heavyweights of streaming online video, the advertisements are relatively thin. If I watch the Simpsons on TV, I have to sit through 8 minutes of commercials. If I watch it on Hulu.com, I can sit through one 1:30 ad in the beginning and enjoy a full episode uninterrupted. Despite years of asinine online distribution strategies by the major networks who refused to cave to the demand for online content, I'm actually pleasantly surprised at their offerings on Hulu and network sites like www.fox.com.
In short -- Sign up for a site like Vimeo or YouTube. Start embedding HD videos onto your current web framework using embed tags that should be allowed by your content management system. Talk to your marketing department about the potential ad sales for affixing advertisements at the end of the clip. If you have a talented web designer, a general manager who is willing to spend resources on improving the website, or are managing a station group and are thinking long-term about the stations within your broadcast group, design a video player using Adobe Flash or whatever technology you want that incorporates the design elements I've enumerated above. Whatever you do, it's imperative that the video solution you choose allows embedding into third-party sites. It's a quick and easy way to draw viewers to your site, and helps encourage other news sites to link to your stories.
Most importantly, remember that the short-term benefits might not be tangibles that show up in a revenue report, but they are essential to the long-term strategy of an online presence that will become increasingly important as people use the Internet more and more for their source of news.
Whatever video solution you use, it should be the centerpiece of your site, on the front page, high resolution and large in screen real estate, and have multiple videos that (ideally) autoplay after the previous video finishes.
Commandment #3 - Thou Shalt Podcast... PeriodExamples:
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Beginner's Guide to Podcasting-
Another Beginner's Guide to PodcastingAt this year's RTNDA conference, I asked the panel of news directors if they provided full newscasts online, not live streams, not short ad-ridden chunks of a newscast, but full newscasts. With the introduction of full episodes of popular shows like the Office, Lost, Family Guy, and Simpsons available on-demand online, it seemed to me that news would follow suit and cater towards people who aren't the type to sit down at a specific time to watch news content -- people like my generation.
I know personally, my viewer patterns have dramatically shifted in just the last year. I watch all of my favorite shows online now and very rarely watch anything non-sports related that's live. I try to never miss an episode of The Daily Show, Meet the Press, This Week, Bill Maher's Real Time, all of which are offered online in their entirety.
Now whether these shifting patterns will apply to daily local news as well is a legitimate question. Obviously, when serious news happens, it's more compelling to watch a live reporter from the scene walks us through what's happening *right now*. But it's pure fallacy to use this as an excuse to avoid catering to people who might not be home during the newscast especially given the relative ease of uploading full podcasts once you know how to do it.
If you're thinking to yourself "Well our site has our lead packages and a few other VO's as well, isn't that good enough?"
I could answer that by simply saying the truth: absolutely not. But the best way to answer this question is by asking another question: If you provided full daily podcasts, would people download it? Well the makers of Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow, and NBC News think so. And viewers seem to want this as well, given from this random example on the iTunes store:
ABC world news **by PerryKing - Feb 8, 2007All I want is: "just a rerun of the ABC World News"..just as it was broadcast...just like NBC does. Please!!!Get it together! *by DK22 - Jan 12, 2008Come on CNN, either do a Podcast or don't! Give us all of the show!Don't even get users started on
Hardball with Chris Matthews on offering only a chunk of the daily newscast.
Sad Excuse for a Podcast *by Chillpicker - Dec 27, 2005Im [sic] calling Chris Matthews out on this one. As a political junkie and a Chris Matthews fan, I am disapointed [sic] by these miniscule tidbits that you've called a podcast. Give us the entire show. Don't go cheap on the podcast Chris. Meet the Press gives us a whole show. Why can't you?41 out of 48 listeners found this review helpfulUseless!! *by Vance Hunnt - Jan 29, 2006I was very excited to hear that Matthews had a Podcast, BUT this! Come on why did NBC even go to the trouble to print up the screen art for this? There are literally commercials on the real show longer than this. They have truly insulted Softball's following. If you're going to do something, do it right.24 out of 30 listeners found this review helpfulHardball **by Compu-Tor - Dec 27, 2005Love Hardball, but am unable to catch it every day, so I was happy to find it on iTunes. But perhaps this Podcast should be renamed to reflect the length of it's content... Tee-Bell with Chris Matthews?21 out of 28 listeners found this review helpfulI could go on and on quoting reviews about people begging for full episode podcasts and not just the snippets. If you truly still believe that people aren't interested in downloading full newscasts, go to iTunes yourself and check out the user reviews of podcasts like Chris Matthews that only offer part of the show and watch these podcast ratings get torn apart. Also, take note of that last review which contained the key phrase "Love Hardball, but am unable to catch it every day." Do you think there are viewers like this one in your market that might not be around during the newscast but would watch it if offered online? If your answer to this question is that you don't have a lot of viewers who use iTunes, that's fine. Just watch when your forward-thinking competition taps that market and builds a user base that you gave away for free.
When I asked the question, the answer disappointed me. At first, they didn't respond to whether or not they offered full newscasts online but rather said "the research" showed that there wasn't interest in downloading full newscasts.
Disregarding my extreme disagreement with their hypothesis and "research", a simple cost/benefit analysis yields a conclusion that the ease of which it takes to offer full episodes online is worth it even if the proposed return in views is relatively low.
Folks, it's really easy to podcast. Read the links in the examples above to get a sense on how easy it is. With most editing systems, it takes about 5-10 minutes to export a half hour of DV footage into compressed video suitable for the web. Utilizing this short amount of time and resources to provide your product in an untapped market is just common sense.
Please also take note that most of these full newscasts online offer extremely limited commercial interruptions. They're trying to build market share rather than reap immediate benefits from ad revenue. It's up to you on how much advertisements you want to include in your online offerings, but I strongly suggest you think about how best to attract viewers to your site as your first priority.
Whether you like it or not, there's an increasing audience out there that doesn't conform to sitting down at a specific time every day to watch a television show. This is how you reach that audience.
Commandment #4 - Thou Shalt Use Advertisments Sparingly and AccordinglyExamples:
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KABC-
KRON-
WCBSAs I've expressed in previous points, there's a delicate balance between advertisements and content. As broadcasters, you know that the 8 minutes of advertisements in every half hour broadcast was reached as the perfect balance between making money and keeping viewers from wanting to change the channel.
Make sure that your website adheres to the same principles. Keep advertisements small and unintrusive. Try to avoid annoying pop-up ads, blinking ads, and any other gawdy monstrosities that detract from your content.
Take a look at KABC's website (which has the same layout as other ABC O&O's). The first thing you see on the page is the gorgeous video player at the top, then content follows right below. In-player ads do show up, as well as just a few graphic ads below the player but it doesn't detract from the content.
I like KRON's website also, as there's basically only one banner ad on the top of another example of a healthy-sized video player. It's a very clean interface that isn't ruined by the subtle but effective advertising.
Commandment #5 - Thou Shalt Engage Thy Audience Beyond A Comment Section
Nothing breeds viewer loyalty more than allowing them to partake in the news-gathering process. We are in a period of time unlike any before where viewers have more power in terms of interacting with their news sources. If you're able to nurture the relationship between the recipient and producer of news, you will not only draw more viewers, but you will help establish your online presence that will be so critical down the road as viewer habits shift more and more to getting their news online. Of course, there are many tools in the toolkit:
Comments
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If you don't have the ability to comment on a story, you're behind the times. There's not a lot to say about comments except make sure they are moderated. If your comments are chock full of racism, xenophobia, and a few other gems Internet trolls have to offer, you're going to get less signal-to-noise ratio. But a comment system is just the tip of the iceberg on how you can engage your viewers.
Twitter/Facebook
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Unless you've been living under a rock the last year, I'm sure you've been told repeatedly that Twitter is the Godsend of all creation and will singlehandedly triple your station's profits. In all seriousness, Twitter is a good device to help you connect with viewers but be careful of how you use it. I've seem some station accounts that use their Twitter accounts to chat about completely random and useless information. If you're only going to use one Twitter account, I'd suggest to keep it professional with updates on your most important news stories. And if you're doing to do it, do it right. Don't post one story a day. Use your account to tease the most interesting stories in upcoming stories. Task your promos person with posting tweets as they write their promos if you have to. If you want to post informally with anecdotes or tweets that aren't newsworthy, use a second account and label it as such.
I'm highly ambivalent about Facebook. If you think a station profile works, go ahead. I mean yeah, by using status updates it's a way to mirror what Twitter does to a different group of viewers, but for some reason I just like Twitter better. I think it's just a natural gag reflex of seeing commercial MySpage/Facebook pages (that aren't a music group) that I've developed over the years.
On a side note, I'm very apprehensive about using personal reporter accounts on Twitter or Facebook to promo stories. If you have a purely professional Facebook/Twitter account, by all means use it to help promo your stories. But in my honest opinion, using personal Facebook accounts to promo your stories to your family and close friends is a bit narcisstic. I mean, all of your friends have dayjobs as well that might have to do with attracting clients. Would you be OK if one of your friends posted status updates like "BTW if you need life insurance hit me up! I can get you a great deal!" OK, off my soapbox...
Messageboard
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Aimoo-
Boardhost.com-
SetBB.comDo you have a place on your website where people can discuss random topics that aren't affixed to a single story? A place where people can discuss what's going on in their neighborhood and initiate discussions on their own? A place where reporters and producers can interact with those people in the community and help bring news tips in?
If the answer is no, then why aren't you doing it? Messageboards can be set up with relative ease and are far superior than the flash in the pan discussions that take place in the comments affixed to the end of a story. Messageboards encourage repeat visitors to your site and can help your station get into the mix of what's going on in the community. Just take a look at sites like
Topix.com which has a local messageboard for cities across the country. Isn't that a market of potential viewers you want to tap into, or at the very least bring them to your site with your ads rather than theirs?
Keep in mind, however, that a messageboard is not something you set up then leave be and expect returns. The more effort you put into it, the more you will get out. If reporters and producers are engaging users and contributing to discussions, people are much more likely to take part and tell their friends about it. Of course, make sure reporters and producers who do contribute know they are representing the station and should refrain from giving personal opinions about the news. But answering questions about coverage or stories, giving anecdotes or information that couldn't fit in the actual stories, etc., are all perfectly acceptable in my opinion.
For those old school newspeople who believe any post by a reporter constitutes a violation of neutrality, I understand. But you can still solicit ideas from the community, moderate discussions, thank those people who provided news tips that turned into actual PKGs, etc.
As with comments, make sure you are razor sharp on moderation. Simply filtering posts against a list of swear words is not enough. Identifying abusive users and kicking them out is essential to the health of any messageboard.
I can say that I've gotten plenty of story ideas from roving the local messageboards and listening to the discussions taking place in local communities. Why not provide a place for them to do that right on your website? At the very least, you'll up the amount of pageviews and therefore advertising that a given user sees.
Flickr Pools
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Flickr-
Consumerist's Flickr Pool-
Recipe Flickr PoolIf you've never heard of Flickr, it's a photo sharing site where individuals can post photos that they share with the rest of the world. One cool feature about the site is to create what's called a "Flickr pool", or a page where random users can contribute photos to your website. Take a look at the examples provided above. For the Consumerist, they help promote the Flickr pool by providing a regular "Best Of" segment where they pick the most amazing photos users have shared and promote them to the front page.
Just imagine doing promotions soliciting viewers to take pictures of an important event that day and to upload them to your station's Flickr pool. How many people do you think will get their camera, take some pictures ranging from decent to magnificent, and contribute to the pool? How many of their friends will they tell? How good will your station look when you tell people the next day about all the fabulous photos that were sent in and that viewers can get all sorts of extra pictures showing what happened.
The best thing about a Flickr pool is that it's all automatic. Of course, you'll have to moderate to make sure pictures are both germane and appropriate. But you won't have to task your web producer with uploading a whole bunch of individual photos. By using the proper HTML tags, you can embed a Flickr pool into your actual site so they won't have to click away to somewhere else.
YouTube
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Same thing as above. Why don't you suggest on-air for people to send in links to YouTube clips they've uploaded that depict a newsworthy event?
User Moderation of Stories
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Examples:
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Digg.com-
DailyKosMany stations are using a "Most Popular" section on their homepage for stories with the most hits. Some use how many comments each story gets to rank what people are talking about. Both of these approaches are fine and dandy, but you can use a different statistic that once again offers active participation by the viewer rather than upping some stat counter that they can't see.
Take a look at Digg.com for a second. The concept between Digg is quite simple and yet it is one of the most popular news aggregators on the 'net. Users rate certain stories up or down ("digg"-ing the story) and as a result, the cream of the crop rises to the top of the listing.
Think about it from the perspective of your viewers. By giving them the ability to rate stories, they can actively take a small part in what stories are considered most popular. Don't have a ratings system (like X out of 5 stars) or negative voting (who wants to let their users tell the station how bad their stories are), but just have a "I like this!" option and see if users start getting involved.
This is exactly how DailyKos grew from just a blog into a fully functioning community. Ignoring politics for a second, take a look at the "Recommended Diaries" on the right hand side of the screen. These diaries are selected out of the hundreds to thousands of diaries posted to the site every day by people who hit the "Recommend" button. As a reader, I am always interested in what shows up there as I know it's not just what one person or an editorial group thinks is important for the day, it's stories that the community as a whole feel is important and as a result has risen to the top of the site.
This option isn't easily adopted into a current web framework, but you can embed a link to "Digg" each story and use that as a way to incorporate this idea into your website. It's always better to use your own moderation system if you have the web talent to accomplish it.
Commandment #6 - Thou Shalt Live And Die By Quality AssuranceNewspapers are used to making sure the print that shows up is meticulously crafted and without error. One bad mistake that isn't corrected before print time makes a paper look incredibly bad when that mistake is reproduced and sent to newstands all over the city.
Yes, we are prone to saying the wrong word on-air, but unless it's a significantly wrong word like an f-bomb, it goes away like tears in the rain (I need to rent
that movie again). But nothing screams amateur like a TV news website that has spelling and grammar errors.
Now at most stations, it's up to the reporter to make sure their story is free of such errors. But all people make mistakes and some are going to get by. At some places, there is not one person who is skilled in the arts of grammar and spelling that is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the site is error-free.
No matter how much the importance of spelling and grammar is spelled out to those who write the stories, the sheer amount of stories that are written on a daily basis means that these drafts will have mistakes.
In all cases, one person should be tasked with QA, checking errors and sending messages to repeat offenders who are making spelling errors. I know this sounds incredibly obvious, but just browsing through random news TV sites you wonder how many spelling errors alone made it through whatever review process they used.
Bottom line: make sure you have someone besides the reporters who is trained in the English language and can actually look through the pieces before uploading them to the web.
Commandment #7 - Thou Shalt Post Content Additional To Thy NewscastNow that you have a website, you have another way to provide content to viewers that isn't restricted by a time limit. Raw interviews, additional extended footage of crazy fires, extended cuts of a PKG, the sky's the limit.
When I shot a multi-part series on Hurricane Katrina two years after the storm, I also uploaded chunks of raw interviews I did with Congressman Gene Taylor about what he was trying to accomplish with insurance reform. Taylor's people were excited that I had uploaded the videos and as a result, one of those raw interview clips is now embedded on the front page of Taylor's own website. If you start regularly promoting these additional videos on your newscast, it will help drive traffic to your website as well as give people the idea that your station gets more in-depth into a story than anyone else.
Also, you want people to think of your site as ideally the first and last stop to get their local news. Try posting stories that are interesting but didn't fit in the 30 minutes. See something interesting in the wires? Post it before the newscast.
Commandment #8 - Thou Shalt Link To Prominent Local Sites In Thy CommunityExamples:
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KVUE's Elise HuMost likely, if I mention the word "blog," some old school newspeople are reeling against associating themselves from the unkempt journalistic hand of the masses. And while there's a lot of innane drivel out there that masquerades as quality journalism, there's also probably a few gems that cover things taking place in your markets.
Here in Texas, there are several quality websites that are not TV stations or newspapers, but they are quality reads nonetheless. In fact, if you look at Elise Hu's blog (my professional crush and excellent political reporter for KVUE in Austin, TX), she links to local political blogs on both ends of the spectrum. By including these sites in the discussion and linking to stories they bring up, she increases both her presence and her station's presence in the community, especially when all these sites start linking back to her.
When it comes down to it, your job as a source of news is to connect your viewers with the community around them. As the cream of the crop rise from obscurity into well-respected blogs and independent websites, you should be the first to welcome them into the news community.
It doesn't hurt that they'll help drive traffic to your site as well. (Do a search on Burnt Orange Report for Elise Hu to see the potential to drive traffic)
Commandment #9 - Thou Shalt Keepeth Content FreshIt pains me to write this commandment as it should be painfully obvious, but I have actually seen websites that don't update during the day until their PKGs are uploaded after the newscast.
Web first. Web first. Oh yeah, web first. Of course, consider the fact that your competition will be reading your website as well, but in the case of breaking news, you should be updating your piece online several times beyond the initial posting as new information comes in.
OK, I'm taking my Captain Obvious hat off now.
Commandment #10 - Thou Shalt Think Long-TermI was watching South Park online at southparkstudios.com (all episodes are available online with limited commercial interruption) when I came across a very prescient quote. It was the episode where the town of South Park no longer has Internet. The residents were in chaos, rioting in the streets and desperately trying to find out why their Internet was out.
Gerald: How can there be no Internet anywhere? What's going on!?Butters' Dad: Anybody got a Blackberry? Check Drudge Report!Randy: Good idea! No, wait, we can't check Drudge Report because there's no Internet!Mr. Garrison: There has to be a way to find out what's going on!Gerald: We can't! Don't you get it? There's no Internet to find out why there's no Internet!Resident: What did we used to do to get the news before the Internet?Everyone is stumped, until Randy comes up with the answer.Randy: A TELEVISION!!There will always be television news, no matter how many news sites spring up on the Internet. But it's important for us to start now to develop a compelling online experience for our viewers that will keep them coming back. We can't keep thinking that a station's website is there "because our competition has a site." There are a significant amount of people who get their news exclusively from the Internet, and with so many players in the information market we're up against more competition than in the past. Instead of three or four television stations competing against each other, television news sites are now up against news aggregators which may or may not link back to their site, newspaper websites, blogs, and many more sources of information.
Conclusion
If many of these ideas seem obvious to you, then you're ahead of the game. But every one of these ideas come from looking at actual TV News sites as a person who has been in Web Design for 10 years. I may be a relative newcomer in the news industry, but as a web designer I do know my way around the Internet and consequently what works and what doesn't.
It's easy to say "well changing our website will require a significant amount of resources, more employees, and we can't afford any of those in these tough economic times." This kind of mindset is precisely why I wrote this guide. If you have money to spend as a station group or an individual station or you already have a talented web department, that's great. But there are also things you can accomplish that don't require a significant expenditure or more manpower, it just requires that you are open to learning new things and incorporating them into your current web framework. Putting your station on YouTube, or setting up a messageboard, or using a Flickr pool, or many of the techniques I've outlined are easy steps that can help improve the user experience that your site provides.
