18 Comments Add your own

• 1. Jim Watson  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 11:23 am

  Keywords DON’T WORK.

  You’re still asking people to remember something.. trust me, they DONT WORK.

  The best thing you can do is create a “weblinks” page and list all those things there… then, hope that you’ve pounded into people’s brains enough that when there IS something promoted on TV that they go to the weblinks page.

  Believe me, our viewers typically can not even remember or describe the stories they are looking for.. many, many times they can’t remember what station they saw it on.. they will NOT remember a specific keyword.

  This keyword thing is NOT a good idea.

  Really.

• 2. Rob  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 12:01 pm

  There will not be a “best option” for pushing to the website until news management realizes that generic teases are a disservice to the viewers / users and they make producers understand and implement specific teases accompanied with video cues that physically show viewers / users exactly what the content is and exactly where they can find it on the website.

  And, yeah, you can’t do that in five seconds, which means you either dedicate more time to push to the web from your newscasts or you don’t do it at all.

• 3. Cory  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 12:06 pm

  Search should be the way viewers find stuff on a TV site, yet practically it’s not easy.

  First, most people who see something on a TV newscast who want to look it up online are in their 50s and 60s, and studies show they’re navigators, not searchers. I can’t begin to explain how many emails we get from people who spend a half-hour trying to navigate to something when all they had to do was search for it.

  Second, as Jim alluded to, TV stations have promoted “weblinks” or “newslinks” or “seen on” sections for years, and undoing that viewer habit will take some hefty promotion.

  And third, these “weblinks” sections usually have some easy tool that the newsroom (TV producers and writers) know how to use to add a link. Many times these links don’t merit stories, so weblinks is a great place to dump ‘em where viewers can find them. Although good search tools can index these, too.

  So I would suggest a measured transition to search while the current systems are still in place, so users can find ‘em either way.

• 4. Ed  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 12:19 pm

  “Believe me, our viewers typically can not even remember or describe the stories they are looking for.. many, many times they can’t remember what station they saw it on.. they will NOT remember a specific keyword.”

  Mmm, talk about a desireable demographic. Any people wonder why local news is in toilet.

  I’ve found keywords do work, as long as you make them simple and clear. So, instead of “route 15 crash”, you just give the keyword “crash” and recycle it every couple of days.

  But, this assumes a transition time between TV and web of a few hours at the most.

  If it’s a “next day, when I get on the computer at work” sort of things, then, I would agree that many people many not ever remember what they were looking for at all, and will need to see headlines and summaries to jog their memory.

  So, I think both are a useful thing. Keywords as a short-term token, and a “seen on tv” listing that goes back a few weeks.

  But, please, update the “seen on tv” listing before the newscast starts, not several hours later..

• 5. Josh Fialkoff  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 1:19 pm

  Having worked at stations using IBS, I used to joke with colleagues that the best way to find stuff on our site was to go to Google and do a site-specific search. The search box on our site was completely useless! People might be more inclined to used station search boxes, if they worked better. Plus, most TV station sites are crammed with so much content it’s hard to find stuff by scanning.

• 6. Safran  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 1:22 pm

  No surprise, but I’m with Warley on this. There’s no “best” way to do any of this, so the best we can do is give the users lots of good tools. Sending them to search is good for a few reasons. First, people are used to search. Second, it stops the “Moron” tease (”For More On this story…”). Third, an “AS SEEN ON TV” section only further delineates the difference between TV and web. We’re trying to converge. The search should be for any time of day, regardless of whether you’ve seen it on TV.

  The TV demo skews older, no doubt. So rather than fight that, we need to make use of the web easy. It’s on the web that we can get those younger viewers back, too.

  But amid the “young people aren’t watching the news” hysteria, remember this, too. As a friend of mine at NBC rightly pointed out: “When you were 18, were YOU watching the local news?”

• 7. Cory  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 3:43 pm

  Safran, I’ll argue one of your points.

  The ’seen on’ stuff will never converge, and it shouldn’t be confused with stories. They’re just links that correspond to VOs, to upcoming events, to reporter tags, etc. Maybe 15 percent of it can be converted to stories, but most of it is pointless — stuff we don’t want to post online because it’s TV stupid but it still needs to be there for reference as a basic service.

  That’s different than creating expanded content wrapped around stories. Those we tease specifically, with a payoff.

• 8. gralnick  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 3:50 pm

  No. No. No.

  Type in a keyword and it is not going to get them to your site or where you want them ON your site.

  Promote smartly with a nugget of actualy “more that you can learn” to get them to your station home page and then make sure that home page is designed robustly and smartly enough so that the navigation is “idiot proof” or “uninitiated-user proof.”

  Keywords just make something that is scary for the new user or the irregular user even scarier.

• 9. Jason Salas  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 4:07 pm

  I did a keywords-based extension of the internal search tool I built for my station (www.kuam.com) for a few years. This was brought to light because as our site grew and got more complex, it got harder for people to find relevant links. This helped largely to point users to PDFs of court transcriptions, image galleries we’d done, video clips, or other multimedia exhibits that might get lost in the larger mix of our text-based archive.

  I used a single database table into which I’d place entries for the keywords and the corresponding URLs for the exhibit being teased (there obviously could be more than one keyword as time went on and to display a better breadth of exhibits, displayed in reverse chronology). The UI for the results page I built used multiple sections to display links for (1) the keyword search, (2) related articles to the keyword from our larger news article archive, and (3) Google results through the Google API. When displayed all on a single page, people really liked the choice.

  Granted, many of the commenters to this post have a point: it requires the user to remember something, have accurate spelling and use certain functions, which if they don’t leads to a negative experience. I agree with them that if this is the single way you present search this is less than stellar, but as a news anchor and developer, I fully support Stephen’s assertion that repeatedly telling people “For more, logon to KUAM.com…” gets old.

• 10. Jason Salas  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 4:13 pm

  I might also add that as an anchorman, the effectiveness of such a referral system is largely dependent on the conviction of those presenting the tease, supported (hopefully) by graphics to reinforce the point and leave a lasting impression on the viewer. Too often I’ve seen talking heads that you can just tell don’t “get” online technology and are just reading script. Those who really advocate the service inherently encourage an audience to do the same.

  Once again, it’s not so much the technical processes behind a system that determine its success, but the social engineering of the people using it that’s the larger challenge.

• 11. Stephen Warley  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 5:47 pm

  One trend I’m glad to see come out of this debate is that there is rarely a “one-size-fits-all” solution as has been the approach in broadcasting for too long. There are multiple options. The point is that we need to listen more closely to our community and need to better address their behaviors. Markets that are more tech savvy may lean toward search, while other markets may have done a great job conditioning people to got to a list of links. While still others have found success using both. Awesome points everyone and thank you for sharing!! At least we seem to be in agreement to bury this “for more on” teases!

• 12. Jonathan  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 7:04 pm

  I’ve always been a fan of how ESPN promotes its online coverage on TV. Today’s big story was the Miami Dolphins coach leaving for Alabama. Instead of a generic “for more,” they teased something specific: “Now on ESPN.com: Why John Clayton believes Alabama is the right fit for Saban.”

• 13. andy  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 9:24 pm

  This post is a bit off topic but I need to respond to this -

  “When you were 18, were YOU watching the local news?”

  This is the type of old world thinking that is really killing the local TV station. There is a base assuption in that statement that the news consumer isn’t really formed until a life changing event (graduate, kids, marriage, buy a car, buy a house). At that point you start to “care” about your world.

  I have an 18 year old and for him this is a very flawed assumption. It may have been just fine in legacy TV but no longer. My 18 year old has been a news consumer for 5 years. Guess were, NOT TV. By the time he hits one of the life changing events he will have been a consumer for almost 10 years. He will have his consumption habits formed and they will be on-line.

  One could argue my 18 year old isn’t normal. I’ll grant you that. The point is that the generation coming up has consumed media since they were learning to read. Almost all of the formative years they have had Internet access. They are entertained and they do research on the Net. Why on earth would they turn on the TV to get their news? By the time they care they will have well worn on-line habits and skills that permeate their lives. These kids do and will get their news on-line. The TV station will not have the chance to tease them to the website cause they will not be watching the TV news.

  I asked him tonight if his friends pay attention to the news. “Yep, some of them.” How? “Google News, WikiNews, News Aggregators and the school recommends Newspaper sites if you are going to site sources.”

• 14. thechicagochannel  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 9:38 pm

  amen, andy.

  my son is a first year at The University of Chicago and when visiting there yesterday i noticed laptops and desktops in every dorm room i walked by, but very few tv’s.

• 15. Safran  |  January 3rd, 2007 at 11:02 pm

  Andy, I understand your point, and it’s really the same as my own. We shouldn’t be bemoaning the notion that “kids don’t watch local news on TV.” We should celebrate it. We should look to the web as the ideal ground upon which to build a business with the smartest and most desirable audience.

  Note that I did not say “Kids don’t care about news.” They care - a lot. Probably more than I did. They don’t care about irrelevant news. They’re better consumers of information.

  I dare say this is the most informed generation, ever. We may or may not like the information they have digested, but it is the most any generation has ever taken in.

  So rather than sitting on our butts, happy to have the 50+ audience in our pocket (for now), we need to recognize the needs of your son and meet them. We’re unlikely to produce a TV newscast he finds meaningful - but we sure as hell can give him access to the very information he seeks.

• 16. andy  |  January 4th, 2007 at 9:36 am

  Steve, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. I was bringing baggage from other conversations I have had into my response.

  We have a saying here about Violent Agreement. I believe we are Violent Agreement.

• 17. Steve Safran  |  January 4th, 2007 at 9:59 am

  I love that phrase and intend to steal it. Violently.

• 18. Chris  |  January 4th, 2007 at 10:07 am

  How about, For more on this story, visit http://www.stationurl.com and enter keyword 555-555-1212?”

  I think it is important to note that we should be trying to capture the search terms that people enter to search our sites … if we spot a trend of a search term that is not highly visible in our navigation, perhaps this data could help us improve the overall navigation/search experience.

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