How are national stories played on your local news sites?
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After scanning the web this morning, I wonder ‘How do local sites use news judgment to pick which national stories make their top spots on their websites?” Many national sites are playing up the Valentine’s Day shooting at Northern Illinois University, but many local sites have opted not to mention it.
After cooking dinner, I was lucky enough to scan the web at 7:45 p.m. Loading up many news sites, as I usually do to check out the national stories, I saw in BIG RED text that a gunman had opened fire on the campus of Northern Illinois University.
Immediately, I steered to MLive and saw the story was not in our main promo spot. I slapped it up immediately, then worked to post it in our blogs with photos and related stories (although the info and pics were sparse at the time).
MLive is blessed enough to have evening staff to watch the developing story throughout the night and update the site. We’re also located close enough to the university (within probably a few hours drive) that likely many Michigan students attend the university. That said, it makes sense that MLive covered the story.
This morning, I noticed that many national sites, including the Washington Post, NYT and some local sites, including The Detroit News, had the story as their top item. But many local news sites did not cover the story. The Detroit Free Press posted the item last night, but did not have the story at the top of their site in the morning.
After doing more scanning, I saw that many local sites are not promoting this story as the biggest news item of the day.
This leads me to several questions:
- How does your local site choose which national stories to play up?
- Does your local site cover national stories?
- How long does a national story have legs on a local site?
- Should the NIU shooting be a homepage above-the-fold item?
- How long should the NIU story stay in your top spots if you are promoting it?
- Is staffing an issue for covering national stories at off-hours?
Apologies for the rushed writing.
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February 15th, 2008 at 11:50 am
You probably have a pretty good idea how I operate, but I’ll tell you anyway.
My basic philosophy is that we don’t try to take on the CNNs and NYTimes of the world. We try to keep the focus on local. However, when a story makes the jump to being something that everyone is talking about on a local level at the expense of what’s going on around town then we put it up on the homepage.
That strategy tends to lend itself to an overabundance of Brittney-type stories on the homepage, which always but always get a lot of traffic. It does have the side affect of eating away at our already shallow souls. So we try to only hit the truly high and low watermarks in the lives of our favorite celebrities.
What amazes me is that some national stories, even when we have a strong local element, only do so-so in page views.
Example: Hillary Clinton was in town Wednesday and there was a resulting controversy centered around her speaking at a Catholic university. We had well over 200 comments on the story, but it only ended up doing around 5,000 few thousand page views between the main story and the comments.
I guess the balance I try to find is giving the audience what it wants and also fulfill our mission of providing our users with important local stories and information.
We’re staffed pretty much from 6 a.m. through 1 or 2 a.m. So we’re usually in pretty good shape to cover breaking news when most people are awake.
February 16th, 2008 at 12:22 am
How was this a local story for Detroit, or even MLive?
It doesn’t belong on a local news site.
February 16th, 2008 at 4:38 am
I’ve often wondered what to do with national stories when I post to our site (www.clarionledger.com).
My pilosophy is that one or two national stories need to be on the site, but they don’t need to be in the most prominent position.
I reserve the main package with art for local news. I sprinkly a few national stories in the update ticker.
Sites of our size tend to do the same. commercialappeal.com, al.com. Larger ones often do. chron.com, ajc.com, azcentral.com
February 16th, 2008 at 9:53 am
At MLive, the focus is to be statewide, with stories of interest for Michigan readers. We also focus locally in our newspaper sections, which are geared toward eight specific markets.
However, we’re learning that some of our readership doesn’t check news websites outside of MLive. That means, if a national story breaks, and they don’t see it on our news or homepage, they don’t see it at all, unless by hearsay. And at that point, they are asking “why didn’t MLive have that story?”
An example my managing producer likes to use is “I heard about Saddam Hussein’s capture when I read it on MLive.” Yes, he checks other news outlets, but he happened to check MLive first that day and that’s where he got the story. We didn’t post every follow-up to that story, as that’s not our focus, but we do want to be able to at least give visitors a hint to big breaking news.
I agree with reserving the main package for mostly local items. We follow the same philosophy, unless it’s a story big enough to impact the lives of our readers. And I will admit, we have done a little posting of britney-type stories (lower down on the page) but the traffic is hit or miss on those.