• Change is the only constant in the media industry and specifically in the news media industry.
   
• The Four C’s strategy that is proposed in this book depends on the concept that readers, viewers, users and listeners today should be considered customers and not just passive participants.
   
• In the midst of all of this change media managers have to learn and adapt to the ever-changing environment that surrounds them.
   
• We must keep in mind that today we are in the relationship business more than anything else. We have to engage the audience and keep the audience and we have to create an ongoing relationship with our audience that is addictive and relevant to ensure the success of our news media. 

• Channel B (breaking news) and Channel C (investigations) both have very strong brands that are consistent across television, mobile and web.  Further efforts by Channel A to copy these stations will likely fail.
   
• Channel A does not have a clearly defined brand.  It is trying to be all things to all people.
   
• Channel A must make hard choices.  Becoming the weather station looks like a natural opportunity.  In order to make a weather brand successful, resources must be moved from other areas.  Some other efforts must be abandoned while others must be de-emphasized.
   
• Channel A’s name should be consistent across all platforms.  Ideally, the name should reflect the brand.  For instance, “Channel A, Weather First.”
   
• Regular news coverage is an essential baseline.  The brand represents important consumer value, but does not make Channel A any less a news organization.
   
• A marketing plan should be created that reflects the viewer/user benefits of the brand.

• Reader research is the starting point for making a decision.  A comprehensive study will indicate which available options readers prefer, how strong their preferences are and how likely readers are to act on those preferences. 
   
• Putting Today’s Area Recipe in another section of the paper will take up resources and space from other content, creating potential conflict for resources within the paper.  Which content is most important?  Will more people read the paper if Today’s Area Recipe is printed every day?
   
• Putting Today’s Area Recipe on the newspapers website would not displace other content, but someone would still have to produce a recipe every day.  Is this effort worth the resources it would take?
   
• A successful standalone app or Web business would be a big win, but also represents the biggest risk. It will require the paper to make a financial investment.  Is there enough reader support to make the business viable?
   
• Which option is most effective for advertisers?
   
• Because a Today’s Area Recipe app or website would continue to present the same kind of information already in the paper, a startup business would most likely be an extension of the newspaper under the newspaper’s brand, not a stand-along organization.
   
• If research determines there is not enough consumer support to make options 1, 2 or 3 viable, then the best option may be to do nothing, leaving Today’s Area Recipe in the Thursday section of the newspaper.

• The print edition contains longer feature stories, "sit-down" news to be perused, or articles about more leisurely activities. 
   
• The website is updated throughout the day with breaking news and shorter articles, and offers searchable services like events calendars, dining guides, etc. to cater to the different interests of an online audience.

• Consider sharing with the students a blog post that enumerates the assets TIME already has in place to support this initiative:  http://tribecafilm.com/blogs/can-documentary-film-save-news-weeklies.  The author suggests that compelling storytelling, photography, good editing -- all of these components are necessary for documentary units and also present in good news magazine feature stories.  He also sees documentaries coming out of some of the international bureaus supported by newsweeklies.
   
• In addition to the possibility that the growing demand for video could lead to some revenue-generating options, this might also be a brand builder for TIME. 
   
• Red Border Films might also be a brand buster if not executed effectively.  A month after to unit’s launch, the Facebook page had fewer than 400 likes. (https://www.facebook.com/timeredborderfilms).  It might also be a distraction and resource drain for the company – documentary production is not something TIME photographers, reporters and editors can do in their spare time.

WRAL’s Social TV Experiment

(Excerpted from http://www.tvnewscheck.com/article/70663/wral-doc-makes-heavy-use-of-social-media, Retrieved Sept. 28, 2013.)

Capitol Broadcasting's CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., produced a documentary on the business of big time college sports.  They used dedicated webpages, Facebook and Twitter to create a first-of-its kind social TV event.

“We were very deliberate in making this a true social and interactive experience,” says Sam Matheny, VP policy and innovation at Capitol. “Our idea is that this makes the program more compelling, encourages a conversation that we really feel needs to be had and appeals to a bigger audience.”

 

How did they do it?

The name of the one-hour documentary, College $ports: #missionormoney, attested to its social media ambitions. A week before it aired, the station started promoting it via Twitter using the hashtag #MissionOrMoney.

WRAL used a slew software to interact with viewers via the website and social media and track their engagement, including TweetDeck, CoverItLive, Social Mention and TVInteract.

To measure immediate social engagement the station used Social Mention, an online tool that provides a snapshot in real time.

“Social Mention allows us to really look at what’s happening right this minute and to measure your sentiment in positive, negative or neutral and see who your top users are,” says Shelly Leslie, creative director at WRAL.

During the broadcast, WRAL news staff used TweetDeck, a dashboard that can follow several Twitter feeds at once, to respond to comments.

The station also added interactive elements to the website, using CoverItLive.

Inside that platform, the documentary team produced second-screen elements throughout the broadcast, like polls or quizzes. Results popped up in the form of pie charts and bar graphs, and influential tweets and conversations were highlighted.

CoverItLive also has a safety feature, allowing someone at the station to monitor Tweets coming in and filter out the ones using inappropriate language.  During the

Viewers could also log into Facebook or Twitter and comment using the hashtag. 

During the documentary broadcast, viewers were regularly encouraged to use their second screen to interact.

 

Did it work?

(Excerpted from:  http://www.tvnewscheck.com/playout/2013/09/wral-social-doc-trended-nationally-on-twitter/ Retrieved Sept. 29, 2013.)

During the documentary’s airing, the hashtag #missionormoney trended No. 1 in Raleigh and No. 6 nationally. The conversation continued on Twitter more than 36 hours after the broadcast, as the hashtag was still trending in the Raleigh market (DMA 24).

Based on a WRAL analysis of Nielsen’s SocialGuide — the division that measures engagement of TV viewing — #missionormoney outperformed the major network averages. (SocialGuide currently only measures national cable and network programming.)

 

What they did right?

The project succeeded because the station followed some of the basic principles of innovation management.

1.  The plan involved workers from every level of the company – from content creators, to the marketing team, to those running the digital division at corporate.

“We’re in a unique position as a locally owned broadcasting company to leverage multiple divisions of our company, all based in Raleigh, for this kind of effort,” WRAL VP and GM Steven D. Hammel said in a statement. “We used the strength and skills of the staffs of WRAL-TV, our sports radio division and our new media division. It was a total team effort and I couldn’t be more proud of what our team accomplished.”

2.  The organization leveraged existing technology to find new applications in a “pushed process.”  Those involved in the project had to research and experiment with the technologies available to understand how the social audience likes to engage with the tools and ultimately had to take a few calculated risks.

Jim Rothschild, WRAL station manager, said, “If you’re not in over your head, you’re not having fun.”

• The site’s “Avg. Visit Duration” is in line with other news organizations and it has a good mix of returning and new visitors.  If you have too few returning visitors, you wonder why they’re not coming back, and with too few new visitors, you obviously have concerns that you aren’t growing audience.  Clearly, on this site, you’d like to get more pages viewed and would like to push that average visit duration higher.   The site has had challenges within its content management system that makes displaying “related content” difficult – that could be one factor limiting its success in keeping visitors on the site.
   
• Facebook is he primary driver of traffic to this site and must be integral to the overall social media strategy.  The percentage of organic search seems low, based on what we see here from Google and Yahoo – organic search makes up about 8% of the traffic to this site and for most news sites, it’s more common to see at least a quarter or more of traffic coming from organic search.  Part of the issue for this site is that it is relatively new to the marketplace, and it employs few search engine optimization strategies on its content.  The site also has an opportunity to improve its Twitter referrals, it has done little more than auto-generate tweets with links to headlines in contrast with its highly-interactive efforts on Facebook.

http://www.tampabay.com/company/about-us

Excerpted from http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/training/transformation-tour/Mobile-News-Publishing.aspx Retrieved Sept. 28, 2013.

In general, developers will tell you that apps work best when they perform very specific functions. For example, the Boston Globe has an app that adds real-time traffic and weather information to a curated selection of the paper’s news content.  The organization also has a responsive design version of its website where consumers can get all the information that’s posted online by the Globe. The app is more narrowly targeted to those on the go.

Jeff Moriarty, vice president of digital products for the Globe and Boston.com, says apps are about creating utility.  A mobile app that provides traffic information is useful for someone driving through busy Boston streets, for example.   In Colorado, the Denver Post released an app with specific details about snowfalls in the area – something local skiers found latched onto quickly.

Armed with that knowledge, it makes sense that the Politfact app is one of the Top Paid in News & Magazines on Google play.

Too many news apps are designed in response to the question, “How can we get all the stuff we publish into an app?” Instead, we should be asking, “What does our audience need in an app, and how can we provide it?”  Politifact has now gone on to develop “Settle It! PolitiFact’s Argument Ender,” which was produced by Poynter and PolitiFact, with a grant from the Knight Foundation. The free app is meant to be a tool for people to quickly find and share fact-checks to set their friends and family straight.

1. THE FASTEST GROWING DEMOGRAPHIC ON TWITTER IS THE 55–64 YEAR AGE BRACKET.

• This demographic has grown 79% since 2012.
• The 45–54 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic on both Facebook and Google+.
• For Facebook, this group has jumped 46%.
• For Google+, 56%.

Those are impressive numbers against the prevailing idea that social media is "just for teenagers." It certainly points to the importance of having a solid social media strategy if these age brackets fit into your target demographic.

Rethink it: Keep older users in mind when using social media, particularly on these three platforms.

(Footnote:  http://www.fastcompany.com/3021749/work-smart/10-surprising-social-media-statistics-that-will-make-you-rethink-your-social-stra Retrieved Feb. 10, 2013.)

Twitter is particularly powerful when it comes to breaking news.  Providing your audience with a source of information about news that directly affects them in-between monthly publications could be of value.  Hosting Twitter Q&A sessions on topics of particular interest to seniors might also be a benefit.

Facebook “contests” such as “Fan of the Day” and others have been extraordinarily successful for local television stations that are trying to grow social media audience quickly.  Though the ability to promote the contest on-air gives local TV an edge, Facebook is an engagement tool that cannot be overlooked.

In 2014, Tech Crunch announced that Google+ was dead (http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/google-is-walking-dead/).  Certainly, it’s still a mystery to many news organizations.  They know it’s a must since being a Google+ member gives you a boost in search results, but beyond experimenting with Google hangouts, not a lot has been done with this tool.  One application would be to find existing Google+ communities that seem predisposed to have interest in your content and to post links to the material there.

Or maybe there’s another social media tool that’s buzzing among your target audience.  The point is, you have to stay current with the tools your audience members are using in order to get your content in front of them.

• The new app will dilute use of the existing app.  The question is: Will the combined reach and growth of the two apps be greater than the current app alone?  Given the importance of weather in Tulsa, and WXXX’s position as the market leader, the answer is probably yes.
   
• The competing station’s weather app is a threat to WXXX’s weather leadership and therefore a reason for WXXX to create its own app.
   
• Weather fragmentation will continue in Tulsa no matter what WXXX does.  If WXXX does not create a weather app, it may eventually be the only station that does not have one.
   
• The investment to create a successful app must be judged against other station priorities.  Weather is clearly a top priority.
   
• Advertising will be driven in part by consumer usage.  Advertising can also be driven by WXXX’s reputation as the Tulsa’s weather leader.  As the advertising manager, you have a measure of control over advertising success. 

• Consolidated already own an array of “general” news businesses, therefore the most likely opportunity is a targeted product or service.
   
• Because your product will be targeted, it will most likely not be part of an existing platform.  However, existing company resources should not be ignored.  The easiest new venture to launch is one that takes advantage of some current strengths.
   
• Understanding the consumer through research is critical to success.
   
• Once a product is chosen and a target persona developed, research and testing will help refine the product. 
   
• Brand is the key to distinguishing your product from others. 
   
• Will the venture be funded through advertising, consumer payments, a combination or some other method?  All are legitimate choices.
   
• The goal is to create a product or service target customers will “love” enough to use regularly and to advocate to their friends.