GABBY AWARDS 2016 DIGITAL INNOVATION WHERE NORTH GEORGIA COMES FOR NEWS

Transcription

1 GABBY AWARDS 2016 DIGITAL INNOVATION

2 >> OVERVIEW AccessWDUN.com, North Georgia s first online newspaper, is the region s most read website for local news, offering our readers traditional news stories, plus audio, video and other interactive features. The site complements our offerings on three radio stations, WDUN AM550, WDUN FM102.9 and 1240 ESPN Radio. We actively use social media to promote content on the air and online, as well as engage our readers in conversations. In 2015, AccessWDUN had a record-setting year. The site averaged nearly 263,000 unique visitors, over 1.1 million visits per month and over 3.9 million page views per month MILLION ONLINE SESSIONS Pages / Session MILLION UNIQUE VISITORS Avg. Session Duration 00:07: MILLION PAGEVIEWS Bounce Rate 43.37% The site, originally called AccessNorthGa.com, was launched in 1999 as one of the first news websites in the region. In 2015, we embarked on a project to both redesign and reimagine the site. It was rechristened as AccessWDUN to better tie together our digital and radio content. Today, we are, in many ways, a digital first newsroom, pushing content as quickly as possible to the website, then getting it on the air. As such, AccessWDUN is not just an extension of our radio offerings. The two entities, coupled with our social media efforts, complement each other in ways that allow us to take our content to as broad an audience as possible. % New Sessions 22.92% These statistics from Google Analytics are for the the 2015 calendar year, the most recent yearly information available. We encourage you to see our site in action. Please check us out at AccessWDUN.com.

3 >> HOW WE DO IT AccessWDUN.com gets its local content from the same newsroom that produces newscasts for WDUN radio. In many cases, the news team operates in a digital first environment, pushing content to the web as quickly as possible, then developing our regular top- and bottom-ofthe-hour radio newscasts. This allows AccessWDUN to be updated continually throughout the day, giving readers a reason to visit the site multiple times each day. Additionally, we pull national and international content from the Associated Press directly onto our site, and we have the ability to very easily make a major national story the lead on our site. Beyond that, we also pull interviews and other content from radio our morning news show, our political talk show and our afternoon news show. We also regularly pull content from Fox News, with which we are affiliated. ACCESSWDUN HOME PAGE

4 >> COMPLETE COVERAGE One of the reasons AccessWDUN.com draws the numbers of readers it does is because of our newsroom s committment to providing complete coverage of what s happening in our local community and the world both in digital and broadcast formats. We strive foremost to be accurate, but we also want to be first. We regularly beat our major competitor, the local newspaper, on breaking news stories. Our website, we believe, is the complete package. We believe we offer more content than any news website in the region, and people trust us to have the stories that matter to them. We post breaking news alerts as warranted (in a distinctive red banner) and weather alerts (in blue). These alerts are also part of our radio news and social media efforts to reach as many people as possible. We post stories as they break, but we also go back to those stories and update them regularly throughout the day, as necessary, adding audio or video elements to give readers more information or alternative ways to get their news. But we are more than breaking news and weather. Our site contains wellread sports (especially high school and college) sections, as well as robust sections focusing on national, business and entertainment news. We are proud to be Where North Georgia Comes for News.

5 >> RADIO-DIGITAL COLLABORATION The success of AccessWDUN.com and our other digital efforts is built on our ability to get significant news content onto our website in a timely manner for our readers. Tuesday August 15th, :44PM But it goes beyond that. A key component to our success is the collaboration that exists between our online platforms and our radio stations. Radio shows promote the website and produce content that is repurposed for online. Likewise, AccessWDUN.com tries to promote the radio stations and drive listeners, either to terrestrial radio or online streaming. We have a box on the homepage that promotes all three radio stations, displaying the currently airing program and provideing a link to an online player so readers can listen online. Additionally, whenever there is a signficant interview, special program or other interesting radio segment, we post a special alert on the homepage (recognizable by its distinctive green color) that explains the program/interview. When the alert is clicked, visitors are taken directly to the streaming player.

6 >> RADIO-DIGITAL COLLABORATION One of the drawbacks to conducting an interview with major newsmakers on the radio is that the audience is limited to the people who were listening to the radio at the moment of the interview. AccessWDUN.com has found ways to overcome this. In addition to posting the full interviews on our Show Clips page (see next page), we post alerts about upcoming live interviews or special programs on the homepage. The alerts are clickable and take readers directly to our streaming player. We have found that use of our streaming player goes up about percent when one of the alerts is posted. For major interviews, the number could be higher. For us, this live streaming is essential to reaching an audience beyond terrestrial radio. Streaming players are available at AccessWDUN.com, WDUN.com and the AccessWDUN smartphone app. As one of our radio hosts like to say, We make it impossible not to listen. We know that the streaming players are helping build our audience. For instance, our Morning Talk political program regularly receives calls from a truck driver, who is in locations up and down the East Coast. Another caller often calls in from Miami. ACCESSWDUN STREAMING PLAYER

7 >> SHOW CLIPS One of the best parts of the radio-digital collaboration is the ability to repurpose radio content online that is, to take a radio interview or segment heard only by people listening to the radio at the time and and distibuting it across our other platforms. On AccessWDUN.com, that can come in a few different ways: We have a show clips page on our website where key segments and interviews from all of our local broadcasts are placed for our visitors to hear. We often take an on-air interview with a newsmaker, convert that interview into a news story on AccessWDUN.com and include the audio from the radio interview with the story. Other times, we let the interview stand on its own. Sometimes, we get interviews with a newsmakers, such as U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson. The interview was not part of one of our radio shows, but was conducted by one of our reporters, who wrote an in-depth story about the interview and included the audio with the story. Additionally, the clips of the interview were used in WDUN newscasts and expanded clips were used as segments on our morning and afternoon news shows.

8 >> SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTION Social media outlets, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have become key ways in which AccessWDUN.com not only distributes its content to a wider audience, but connects and converses with its readers and listeners. These social media interactions are great ways for us to hear what our customer think, but it also allows us new and innovative ways to share the news of North Georgia. FACEBOOK: During a typical day, we share five or so of our top stories with more than 10,100 friends on Facebook. Sometimes we simply share the link to a significant story. Other times, we post a link and pose a question we hope will generate conversation. On election night, we posted early returns, and then gave our Facebook friends ways to follow election news on the website and/or on our radio stations. And we use Facebook across platforms. Russell Brown, the host of our afternoon radio news program, poses a Question of the Day on Facebook. The question often becomes a segment on the show, where responses from Facebook are read and discussed and other members of the show s cast weigh in on the questions, too. In 2015, Facebook referrals to AccessWDUN.com were up more than 130 percent, accounting for 17 percent of all web sessions.

9 >> SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTION TWITTER: Twitter is becoming a important player in our efforts to read a larger audience with our content. We operate a main Twitter which promotes general news content on our website and promotes upcoming programs on radio. We also support five other accounts that are based around a particular topic, such our highly popular account that focuses on high school football, which is huge in our region. Followers of this account get high school football news during the week, but the account is particular popular on Friday nights, when it is used to send out scores and highlights from as many as 30 high school games in our region. We also produce a weekly video feature called Player of the Week. The video is posted on AccessWDUN.com and promoted through social media. Audio from the player interviews is also used in Game On with Katie B. Davis, our daily sports talk show giving the video a signifcantly larger reach. Twitter is also a way we interact with readers/listeners. In honor of the launch of the website s redesign and our parent company s 66th anniversary, we gave away gifts, such as free lunches, as part of Random Acts of Kindness promotion. Later, we ran a Father s Day promotion, where we asked people to post pictures of their fathers to be eligible for a prize. We asked people to use the hashtag #WellDUN, a play on our call letters, to help us track the posts.

10 >> USE OF VIDEO Since our redesign, we have ramped up our use of video on AccessWDUN.com. Our old site used some video, primarily in the form of video newscasts and in sports. But our new site takes full advantage of the storytelling capabilities of video. We use video to complement a written story, whether it lets the reader see a full interview, an actual event happening or some other details that would be difficult to describe in print. Audio is often pulled from these videos and repurposed for radio news broadcasts. Video sometimes is used exclusively as the way to tell a story, without an associated written story. This works beautifully when the story is more visual and often includes a reporter stand-up. Occasionally, we produce standalone videos for special features. For instance, on the Fourth of July, we produced a video that looked back at the founding of our country, using patriotic music, historic photos and commentary from a historian at the Northeast Georgia History Center. Our sports department also uses video in signficant ways, from game highlights and interviews to season previews and player profiles.

11 >> BLOGGING Blogging is certainly nothing new, but when we launched our staff blogs in 2015, our thoughts on blogging were the same as with other innovations on our site. We saw the blogs as a way to produce unique content for our readers, as well as creating content that could be repurposed across all of our platforms. The blogs on AccessWDUN.com were the brainchild of Mitch Clarke, who previously wrote an award-winning column for the local newspaper. He brought his slice-of life column to our website, and he invited other staffers to contribute, too. Alyson Shields writes a regular blog, complete with photos and video, about unique sites in North Georgia. Brian Stewart rights about Georgia sports, while Russell Brown writes about Georgia Tech. Bill Wilson has a love of old television and entertainment and shares his throughts in his blog. Marc Eggers writes about fishing, which is perfect for a city on Lake Lanier. But these blogs also become content on radio. Clarke has a weeklly segment on the Afternoon News Wrap, where his blog is often the topic of discussion. Shields produces a segment on odd news for the same show, and she often segues into conversationa about the odd places she s just visited. The blogs by Stewart and Brown are often the fodder for conversation on our sports talk show. And Wilson sometimes uses things he talks about in his blog in his weekly entertainment report.

12 >> INCLEMENT WEATHER At AccessWDUN.com, we have taken inclement weather coverage to a new level, pairing what s best about radio with what s best about online content to give North Georgia an unbeatable source of weather information. We post watches and warnings in an alert at the top of AccessWDUN.com, announce them on the radio and post on our social media accounts to reach as many people as possible. We maintain a comprehensive list of school and business closings online, and our radio hosts drive traffic to the site, rather than reading a long list of closings on air. These are also posted on social media. We encourage readers to send in photos of snow, flooding or other storm-related incidents and we create a photo gallery online. This lets us expand our coverage beyond just those areas where our reporters can go. During a recent ice storm that cut power to our station (and much of the city), two of our radio hosts broadcast storm information to listeners from our transmitter site, while reporters fanned out to wherever they could find wi-fi to update the site. We knew that while people might noy have electricty, they were trying to get information via battery-powered devices, like cellphones, tablets and radios. We were proud to provide this service, especially under demanding circumstances.

13 >> SHOOTING AT GSP POST Nothing provides a better way to show how we can disseminate news across multiple platforms like a breaking news story. And in June 2015, we got that breaking news story: A man drove up to the Georgia State Patrol post in Gainesville and fired two shots before being shot himself by troopers. When we heard the first reports of a shooting, our newsroom sprang into action. One reporter quickly prepared a short blurb for AccessWDUN.com, and another prepared radio updates all while another reporter and videographer went to the scene. Over the next several hours, we told the story in these ways: Our on-scene reporter regularly filed audio reports for radio, while funneling information to the reporter writing the web story. Information was regularly updated on social media. Our videographer was the first on the scene and began gathering video for a special online report. We obtained both the 911 audio call and dashboard video from a trooper s car. They were both posted online, and audio from the 911 call was used on radio. A news conference with the GBI, state patrol and others was held at 1 p.m. Our videographer recorded it and posted it online. But we also streamed the conference live online with a special alert banner on the homepage promoting it.

14 >> 2016 VOTERS GUIDE WDUN Radio is a news/talk station, and most of our programs both locally produced and syndicated are centered around state and federal politics. Late in 2015, as the presidential campaign began heat up, we launched a Voters Guide page on AccessWDUN.com. The Voters Guide serves not only as a companion piece for our radio programs, it functions as a standalone site for our online readers. It provides links to presidential candidate websites. It provides a calendar of primaries and caucuses, information on how to register to vote and how to find your polling location. As candidates qualify for local races this year, the site will be updated as a terrific resource to help readers learn about the upcoming elections. Although the site resides on our website, it is promoted regularly on Morning Talk, our morning political talk show, and on Afternoon News Wrap, our weekday news program. It is also promoted regularly across social media.