Knight Ridder Digital Cedes Some Control

By: Steve Outing The Web sites of Knight Ridder's U.S. newspapers endured a bit of controversy earlier this year -- each adopting an identical look and feel dictated by the media company's Internet arm, Knight Ridder Digital in San Jose, Calif. The new design was derided in many quarters of the industry as "cookie cutter" and not particularly attractive. Sites also lost their newspaper branding in large part as "city.com" Web addresses were emphasized over "newspaper.com."

While critics (including this one) viewed the strategy as a mistake, now the company has backed off somewhat from its centralized Web strategy. Local newspapers in the KR chain now have more control over their own Web sites -- with the ability to decide for themselves (mostly) what they wish to emphasize (city.com vs. newspaper.com) and more control over how their sites look. They have more options for making the sites best reflect their communities, rather than be saddled with a corporate-wide design.

The changes come into play a couple months after the departure of Dan Finnigan and the arrival of Hilary Schneider in the CEO slot at Knight Ridder Digital. Schneider, who previously was CEO at Red Herring, quickly learned the ropes and let her presence be felt -- bringing in a wave of new top managers and laying off some existing personnel. (Overall, KRD has lost only a handful of employees, according to a company spokesman. Some people have been moved to other positions as a result of new hires coming in for new and existing positions.)

One of Schneider's first significant decisions was to appoint nine general managers at the Internet operations of KR's largest newspapers: Philadelphia, Miami, Kansas City (Mo.), San Jose, Charlotte (N.C.), Fort Worth (Texas), Akron (Ohio), Contra Costa County (Calif.), and St. Paul (Minn.). (Smaller KR papers do not get an Internet GM, but a Web "point person" or liaison from each paper's staff.)

The big-market GMs are in a newly created position within the Knight Ridder Internet operation, and they report to KRD executives in San Jose as well as their local publisher. Previously, newspaper Web site managers reported directly to KRD.

According to Schneider, the new structure has the locally based GMs -- who are KRD employees -- running their own Web sites. What's changed, she says, is "our recognition that [we] need to partner [better] with the local publisher" to create a stronger local Internet experience and win locally. The structure remains such that local KR newspaper Web sites are a partnership between KRD and the local publisher -- a symbiotic relationship where decisions about marketing and programming (and to some extent, editorial) are made jointly.

While KRD under Finnigan swung mightily toward central corporate control, the new strategy seems to appease local publishers but probably not entirely. Schneider alluded to that when she said during an interview, "The way (Knight Ridder Internet operations) win is not by me winning an in-house popularity contest." That sounds like a statement that KRD will still be pushing hard to have its corporate point of view prevail as discussions about how the newspaper sites will change play out.

One of the biggest decisions that KR's largest newspapers will make in the coming weeks is whether to emphasize the "city.com" or "newspaper.com" Web branding. Under Finnigan's watch, the sites emphasized the former -- Miami.com, Charlotte.com, DFW.com, Philly.com, etc. While that fit in with KRD's strategy for its Real Cities network of sites (which is primarily a national advertising play), it didn't sit well with all local publishers or Web managers, some of whom felt that emphasizing the newspaper was the obvious correct strategy for their specific markets. (Under the now-discarded schema, a Web user going to www.miamiherald.com would automatically be redirected to a www.miami.com page, for example.)

Schneider says that now the company is committed to having one dominant brand in each market. Miami could choose to emphasize Miami.com, while Fort Worth could choose Star-Telegram.com, for instance. Those are decisions to be made by examining each local market -- in one market the city.com name might go over best, where in another the local populace more strongly identifies with the newspaper brand they've long known.

This is more an issue of branding than a choice between the content of a KR newspaper's site being a "city guide" or a news-oriented site. Most KR papers' sites are focused more on the news, as opposed to being a pure "city guide" in the sense of a city site produced by CitySearch (e.g., Denver CitySearch), which is almost purely information/data/listings. A "city.com" moniker does not pre-suppose that a KR site that chooses that URL for dominance is going to change to a CitySearch-type model.

Schneider emphasizes that it's the product strategy, not the brand name, that is the real driver of KR's Web sites' success. KR sites will continue to have the "city guide" function be a significant part of what they do.

Obviously, as demonstrated by the failure of "pure" city guides like CitySearch and Microsoft's Sidewalk (which was folded into CitySearch) to become significant businesses, it's not easy to make a go of it when you have to rely largely on local advertisers. City guide sites in general have found it more difficult than expected to pry advertising dollars out of small local businesses like restaurants and auto repair shops.

Ergo, the national strategy for bringing in national advertisers is something that's sticking in the KR Web model. What Schneider and her team realized, apparently, is that success at attracting national ads is predicated on local-market success. And local-market success is unlikely to come from cookie-cutter sites that don't adequately reflect local needs and are directed from afar.

Knight Ridder's Real Cities network has grown to 56 U.S. cities and is becoming a viable ad network -- but it still lacks some major cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles. (Real Cities also includes non-Knight Ridder partners -- some of which choose not to use KR's Web content management system which dictates how their sites look.)

About those dead links ...

When Knight Ridder Digital switched to its new content management system earlier this year, one of the results of all the KR newspaper sites moving to the new design was that links to thousands of old documents and sections on the sites stopped working. Because the sites' content was indexed by Web search engines, and linked to by many thousands of other sites, many Internet users clicked on content and were re-routed instead to a default page explaining that KR had changed its systems -- and the content the users had sought could no longer be found.

KRD was criticized soundly in the trade press over what many observers suspected was a major snafu. According to Ross Settles, KRD's new vice president of strategic marketing, the choice of not converting old links to work in the new system was a business decision (made before Schneider and Settles joined the company). A technology manager at KRD confirms that the content management system was capable of keeping the newspaper sites' old links working -- and still is.

According to Settles, during the coming months as individual KR sites and KRD staff jointly decide on the best individual-site strategies, the dead-old-links issue will be revisited. Based on available resources to accomplish the task, some of them could be resurrected. He says it's unlikely that every old link that died during the CMS changeover will be revived, but prominent ones might be -- for example, previously working links like "www.miamiherald.com/sports/" might again point Web users to the Herald's sports page instead of a Miami.com home page.

Knight Ridder's newspaper sites could benefit from the return-to-local-roots Web strategy. In the Newspaper Association of America's Digital Edge Awards presentation earlier this week, Knight Ridder Web sites did not win a single top award -- out of a total pool of 25 categories. (Identical results were had in Editor & Publisher's 2002 EPpy Awards for best online newspapers, presented last February.)

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Letters

My last column, "Board The Weblog Bandwagon Now, Please," prompted quite a few letters. Here are a few:

Been there, done that

C'mon, Steve. Blogs are nothing more than the latest manifestation of the personal home page fad of five years ago. Been there, done that. 99.9% of them (like the home pages) are insipid crap. Blogs are no more an exciting new medium than their close relatives, newsletters. There will always be a place for good ones (indeed, there's a place for quite a few more good blogs, a la Romenesko, aimed at the professional/trade markets), but the idea that every staffer would be bloviating in a blog would send me running from a news site as fast as I can go. ... And there's one ENORMOUS difference between blogs and eBay/classifieds: no known business model.

Mark Potts

Too late to help some

You wrote: "A few years ago, 'community publishing' was all the rage in the online news industry. Companies like the now-defunct Koz provided expensive solutions that allowed community groups to publish on a newspaper site. The idea was for this to be ad supported -- but the concept proved too fragile and the systems too expensive to survive the dot-com crash. The idea of a local news company hosting community organizations' weblogs now would appear to be a less expensive, less complex replacement for community publishing systems.)"

I agree with this statement. The fragile concept was that groups wanted group publishing which we (I was employee #5 at Koz) found was flawed since usually one person managed the website/published relevant content no matter how many members they had. The group-ware model seemed like the panacea for those overworked volunteers -- let everyone that wants to publish. Well, turns out that not many people want to, so the many-to-many concepts failed.

I remember using Blogger for the first time and thought, boy! we are so dead. It was (is) easy to use, and free and no huge media branding/ads/links all over your pages. Just a simple tool for that one person who has the thankless job of getting the word out for the group. If we (at Koz) would have created a blog system and coupled it with a listserve engine we would still be going strong (or bought by the likes of Yahoo!).

I doubt that media brands can offer user blogs in a successful way since they are still so scared of the opinions that will be published by the unwashed masses (and have their brand wrapping them). I do like your idea of giving each journalist a blog -- great way to extend context beyond the print product and the shovelware pages of so many papers.

BTW, there are still some "successful" community sites running the old Koz CPS software. Successful meaning folks using it frequently to publish their Web sites; certainly not successful in revenue generation. A good example is a local non-profit that "bought" the community system from Media General's Winston-Salem Journal to keep it going for the 700 or so groups actively using it. Key word being "non-profit." Unless you can bank social capital, online communities will always be non-profit.

Still "one-to-many" in most cases though just took way longer to propagate than the investors wanted.

Andy Brewer
Former KOZ Guy

God help us

Interesting column on weblogs ...

Yes, potentially it's a cool idea. But in reality I have yet to see a single weblog that I found interesting. Not one. And I read all those columns and news stories about weblogs, anxiously awaiting the first tip about an interesting one. Sorry. They're all dull, poorly written, self-indulgent or just not about anything that interests me. But I like the IDEA. Dan Gillmor's comes closest ... but frankly I don't give a damn about legislation and company CEOs. (I love what Romenesko does, but I don't consider that a weblog because he has no personal commentary. I read his stuff every day.)

COULD they be done well: yes. ARE they: no. Okay, so maybe it's me.

But I find two things at work here:

1. I still don't like reading large chunks of text online. I go online for briefs, scores, stats, whatever. If I come across a good story I want to read, I print it out and take it on the train. However, that's rare. Weblogs seem endless, yada, yada, yada. Zzzzzzzzz. God help us if we have MORE of them!

2. I think weblogs at this point are like the early fuss over PageMaker. "My gosh, with this technology anyone can publish their own newsletter now!" Yeah, but most people have no talent in that area.

Tom Priddy
Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services

Toying with the notion

Enjoyed your insightful column today. I've had a Blogger.com blog for about a year (although I only recently began updating it with any regularity). For some time, I've been toying with ideas on how to use it to complement my work here at the (San Diego) Union-Tribune. So far, I've mainly just linked to my columns and stories, and provided a bit of background, etc. But I think you're right that they could prove to be highly valuable creative tools for newspapers. Thanks for the stimulating thoughts.

James Hebert
Staff Writer
The San Diego Union-Tribune

Use it for news beats

When I applied for, and received, a grant from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism last summer, I didn't know a weblog from a Lincoln Log. But the concept of the grant application turned out to be a perfect fit for blogging. The idea is that all reporters ought to take advantage of the Web. In fact, the grant was to experiment with Web-based, interactive beats. I keep hounding reporters: "Working the Web as part of your beat will make for better journalism! Better stories! Better sources!" I think it's maybe just beginning to sink in. I really appreciate your insights and opinions on this. Keep up the good work!

Ken Sands
Interactive Editor
Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.)

Sparking 'reader' interest

Good story. I'm a news junkie and am rapidly becoming enamored with political blogs. I've wondered if newspapers would notice blogdom. My local paper is a lame Gannett 50,000 circ. joke, probably hatched in the corporate offices 800 miles away. I find that it's basically irrelevant to my life and rarely bother to buy it, much less subscribe. Yahoo! provides local movie times, I don't need a job, car or house, so have no interest in the classifieds. While I don't need the paper I would be interested in the expanded thoughts of some of the writers and more pics from the photographers. My paper seems to have the idea of offending no one so it ends up engaging no one, at least not me.

Michael Kapsalakis

Are you dreaming?

I read your column today about how newspapers should get into weblogs and I think you were way off on a few points.

For starters, it is just not economically realistic to claim newspapers missed the boat on auctions and employment sites. The reason is, both of those undertakings are of a character where rapid concentration to a single site (eBay and Monster, for example) or a handful of sites [is optimal].

It is not realistic in the least to think that 1,600 daily newspapers (or however many there are now) could each set up an auction site and a jobs site and hope to make money. In theory, I suppose, some sort of newspaper consortium could have started eBay or Monster, but, still, if it were a consortium of 1,600 newspapers, what would be the point? There still wouldn't be a lot of money to pass around, even if 1,600 newspapers could get together on anything.

Well, what about weblogs? I read your advice that publishers should spend money getting reporters and editors to create, format, and post news content as weblogs. (It's silly to think this could be done at no cost, as you essentially maintained.) Goodness, where's the revenue in that? I don't think newspaper publishers are afraid of the Internet; they're just afraid of offering yet another service for the good of mankind and for no other reward.

It seems to me that if you want to advise publishers, you ought to learn how they think and the pressures and values that motivate them. Urging them to devote more resources to charity journalism just isn't likely to fly.

Stan Jones
Anchorage, Alaska

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Other recent columns

Board The Weblog Bandwagon Now, Please, Wednesday, June 26
Experts Offer Tips On Usability, Wednesday, June 12
Libraries Threaten Paid Online Archives, Wednesday, May 29
Content Publishing Systems Squash News Design, Wednesday, May 8
Have u 4gotten IM?, Wednesday, April 24
News Sites Repeat Mistakes Of the Past, Wednesday, April 10
USC J-School To Teach Convergence To All, Wednesday, March 27
Previous columns

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