Tuesday, March 29, 2011

A first look at the KPLU River of News

Local news stations in public radio find themselves faced with some very difficult decisions—and some strong pressures to make those decisions.  Even strong news stations, with excellent programming, good management and growing financial support, balk at the idea of six or seven figure investments to expand their online news operations. 

Managers ask, "how do we pay for this over the long run?" News directors ask, "what's the best way to reallocate staff and reorganize production processes?"

Looking to help stations work thought these thorny issues, Public Interactive has stepped forward to solve some these question.  The main piece of the solution is a new content management system, sometimes described as "the river of news."

By mid-March about half a dozen sites were piloting the new CSM, and the most important example was KPLU's website in Seattle/Tacoma. 

Fortunately, KPLU is part of a ten-station working group of PMM clients, so we have been able to monitor the impact of the transition: before and after the implementation of the new CMS.  And so far, the results are encouraging.

Local Visits/Views of News

To test the impact of of the new publishing system, we created a Google Analytcis "Advanced Segment" that filtered out out traffic except for  visits only from major Washington State cities, including Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Bellevue, Bellingham, Renton, Lynnwood, Redmond, Spanaway, Kirkland, Seahurst, Spokane, Mountlake Terrace, Everett, and Puyallup. 

Then we looked at activity for these visitors, using the Content reports available in Google Analytics, filtering for just those pages with news content in two  seven week periods: September 12 through the end of October, 2010 (before the new system was being installed) and January 23 through the middle of March, after the new PI system was ready.

  The results point in the right direction. Total "newsviews" increased by 19%, and then, looking at the top 100 stories published in each period, we could see that on average, each story in that top-tier of news items attracted a measureable increase in use, from 177 views/story to 237 views/story.

These results were reviewed and confirmed by the staff at KPLU who expressed a good deal of satisfaction with their new platform and confidence that the pilot would lead to stronger news performance in the coming months.

• tim davis