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.

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

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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..