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Published on: 7/1/2008
Last Visited: 2/16/2009
"When we looked at our content and processes," says Mike Wilson, digital media manager for The Advocate and also for its affiliated television station, WBRZ, "we found a major disconnect between the news staff and the technical staff."
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"We have a list of Hot Topics," Wilson says, "which can be created on the fly as stories evolve."Mini-sites related to the Hot Topics can be created that have an array of items that allow news staff to add, mix and match to get a top down view on a particular story.
In the process of shifting to the Clickability Platform, The Advocate thoroughly reviewed its content and expanded its range considerably."Originally, we had only a few types of content on our Web site," Wilson explains.
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"We have had many different retention policies," says Wilson, "some of which were simply a function of what the system could do."For example, at one point, content more than 30 days old was removed from the Web site and was available from an archive for a fee."Now, though, we are moving toward a 'long-tail' model of content retention, having all content available at all times," he says.Readers cannot necessarily navigate to all the content through links on Web pages, but can access it via search.
The logic for the change is strong, according to Wilson, because "the reality is, once you put something on the Internet, it is out there forever."Because the storage costs are low, the newspaper is best served by drawing readers to its own site.An exception is video, because the files are large; but for text, no limit is placed on the length of time for which it is stored.
One advantage to keeping the content handy for a long time is that when a story is updated or takes on new life because of recent events, background material is readily available.Providing a lot of associated information engages people more."We see increased revenue from advertising because people come back to a sticky site," Wilson says.
The Clickability Platform provides metrics that help determine which stories stay on the most accessible pages."If we think a topic is a good one but it's not getting a lot of clicks," notes Wilson, "we take a look to find out why-maybe it needs a better headline, for example."Comments from readers are also reviewed.But if interest remains low, "we are ruthless," he says.
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