www.bonanza

Whether it's providing season stats for local athletes, breaking news, weather reports or wake-up calls, the region's media Web sites are more than just a place for yesterday's news, and their ever-more-sophisticated online strategies are boosting readership and bottom lines.

Naples Daily News publisher John Fish projects that from 2004 to the end of this year, the paper's Web site revenues will more than triple. And Waterman Broadcasting Corp., which

operates NBC2 and ABC7, also gets a big boost from its Internet division. Web site revenue increased 100 percent during fiscal year 2004-2005 over the 2003-2004 period, and is on pace to double again in the next fiscal year.

Waterman's Internet director Keith Norman says advertisers and the public want to receive more information online and via other sources, such as cell phones, especially in this age of mobility. "This community is expecting to get its news when it wants it, how it wants it and where it wants it," he says.

Bucking Expectations

When Rob Curley arrived at the Naples Daily News last summer from the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, he and his team jumped right into creating a new bonitanews.com site.

Their goal was to do more than "shovel over what you put on the press last night." They examined the community to help determine Web content. They created a calendar listing everything from arts events to support-group meetings. They built a database of high-school athletes with game statistics, biographical information and player comparisons. And they developed a detailed guide to local restaurants, with not only addresses and phone numbers but also information about vegetarian dishes, wireless access and more. "You have all these amazing restaurants in town; you should have a world-class restaurant guide," says Curley, the paper's new-media director.

He heard from naysayers who questioned the demand for online content, especially when comparing a college town like Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas, to a retiree hot spot such as Naples.

"There couldn't be a market more polar-opposite to Lawrence, Kan., than Naples," says Curley. "To me, the opportunity and the challenge made it, 'You gotta come here to try this.'"

He attributes the success to various factors. For one, as the owner of newspapers and radio stations, as well as HGTV and Food Network, Daily News publisher Scripps Howard Co. has for years seen opportunity in niche markets. "They are incredibly huge risk takers," Curley says.

In addition, his multimedia team is sizable, with 25 staffers, including five full-time videographers, plus reporters and editors who contribute breaking news reports and blogs, for example.

With about a dozen multimedia staffers, The News-Press also has found success in niche online features, as well as continuing to focus on the bread and butter of the business. "We are very much geared toward breaking news all day long," says Mackenzie Warren, deputy to the publisher for special projects. "What we are striving to be is the primary source of online news information and advertising for Southwest Florida. Within that framework, that's always been our mission since we've had a Web site," he says. "Just like we wouldn't do art for art's sake, we wouldn't do technology for technology's sake."

Fresh content is critical, with staffers posting 10 to 20 new stories each morning, for example, along with photos and, occasionally, supplemental video and audio. The paper is putting more resources into its site and reconfiguring jobs to eventually provide 24-hour online coverage. That might not happen by year's end, but Warren expects to have the site covered 18 hours a day, seven days a week by that time.

"Thousands of people are reading our Web site at 2 a.m.," Warren says. "We need to have something there at 2 in the morning."

As with the Naples paper, prep-sports coverage is important for The News-Press, which has personal home pages with game-by-game stats on more than 5,000 athletes in six counties. The paper plans to expand that by adding more sports and schools.

Another popular feature is the site's "community conversation" opportunities-a strong traffic-generating format. Online readers' forums include everything from the December 2005 Gateway murders to the issue of Florida Gulf Coast University becoming a Division I school.

Warren says it's like an online water cooler. The idea is to change the traditional thinking that the "owners of the presses are the only ones that get to say what's going on," he says. "The Internet is a tool that breaks down that barrier; it lets anyone who wants to have a voice have an equally

loud voice."

The News-Press Web site team is responding to what research has found about Southwest Florida's baby boomers. "The people who are moving to Southwest Florida also are people who are picking up a dependence on the Internet the fastest of any demographic group," Warren says.

Today's snowbirds have a much different profile from those who retired in Southwest Florida a couple of decades ago. Instead of someone who comes down after Christmas and leaves at Easter, today's seasonal residents travel back and forth multiple times from Florida to their other home, and many continue to work.

"They need access to information, and they're working remotely because they're going back and forth," Warren says. "They are not just the people who play shuffleboard and golf and that's it; they lead a more active lifestyle."

Warren no longer gets calls from retired residents who can't find the site because they don't understand how to type a Web site's URL. "These people are fast becoming a savvy group of users," he says, noting that they're participating in forums and posting pictures of their grandchildren online.

Curley agrees. "To me, the idea that people think that this area of Florida doesn't have computer users is one of the most naive and silly things I've heard in my life," he says. "It's a much different market than people perceive it to be."

Viewers and Advertisers

The Internet mindset is radically changing. When Norman started at Waterman in 1999, local advertisers were not thinking about buying online advertising, he says. Now, they're realizing the return on investment.

"In the last two years, we have become, frankly, a place advertisers want to be," he says. "That's where their customers are."

The cost to reach 1,000 people is $10 to $15, known in the industry as cost-per-thousand impressions, which is in line with traditional media, Norman says. It's common now for a client to ask for both on-air and online commercials and advertisements.

The most popular features on the two stations' Web sites are weather and video. Although they've been streaming breaking news, the stations plan this year to launch live, regularly scheduled, streaming newscasts. The weather coverage has evolved from static images of Doppler radar and five-day forecasts to posting all of its on-air graphics, forecasts and maps online as well as animated Doppler radar with a zoom feature allowing viewers to gather precise information about their neighborhood. "We've given viewers more control in their experience with our weather products," Norman says.

Waterman's Web sites also show a strong correlation between the Web and television. When viewers are advised during a newscast to look online for more information, there is a spike in Web traffic, and when an on-air segment is promoted online, more folks tune in. Of people who watch ABC7 and visit the station's Web site, more than 40 percent say they go online when told to do so by the station's anchors, Norman says. The number for NBC2 is in the 30 to 35 percent range. "We try to increase our online viewing and our on-air viewing by cross promoting through both platforms," he says.

The papers and television stations declined to provide specific figures for online viewers or revenue, citing confidentiality and proprietary issues, but the Web also is changing circulation of print media.

Warren says the way newspapers calculate their audience is changing because of the Internet. Instead of talking about circulation, many in the industry look at the overall product mix.

"We are so beyond circulation," Curley says. "Right now, you've got to call it like it is; the newspaper is still our biggest moneymaker, but we no longer talk about circulation anymore. We talk about audience and readership. We think the newspaper industry has really, really screwed up by still focusing on circulation instead of readership."

Just as newspaper Web site designers are experimenting with online content, they're constantly working on new models for advertising on the Web. "We're trying to integrate the advertising into the content in ways that have never been done before, and we look at advertising as very valuable content online," Fish says. "We're in a position to offer sponsorships and advertising packages in various platforms that we've never been able to do."

For example, the Daily News has recently built TV commercials for Greg Norman and his Franklin Templeton Shootout and signed a three-year contract with Premier Properties to develop Internet, TV commercial and video ads. "We're creating many new streams of revenue in a business that in the past basically relied on just one," he says.

Publicly-traded Scripps Howard expects total newspaper revenue to grow by 4 percent to 6 percent in 2006 as it continues to develop new print and online products in each of its newspaper markets to strengthen its share of local advertising revenue. The company is expecting strong growth in online revenue to continue, accounting for nearly one-quarter of the year-over-year increase in total revenues.