On Air. Online. On Demand.

On Air. Online. On Demand.
Interactive media strategies from
Guam’s News Network
Jason Salas
jason@kuam.com
www.jasonsalas.com/insideKUAM
Just good enough
just isn’t good enough
The news media biz
 Extremely easy to get into
- …but phenomenally difficult to be good at
 Audience expectations monumentally high
- Users deserve better ways to experience information
- One chance to get it right
 Hypercompetitive
- The Web is mass media’s Great Equalizer
- Constant battle for eyeballs
- It’s nearly impossible to keep up
Mainstream media challenges
 News was the first industry the Internet really
touched
 Strategy decay across mediums
- Print has been dying for years
- Radio’s business model is horrendous
- TV already heading down the same path
 It’s not the profession, it’s the platform
Online news challenges
 Doing web news right means you have to be really,
really, really good
 News sites are perpetually unfinished projects
 Avoiding shovelware
 The Web’s most complex sites deal with news
- Frequency
- Syndication
- Volume
- Deep linking
- Responsiveness
- Breadth of formats
- Search
- Device support
- Multimedia
Breaking news on the Web
 Reporting online…first
- You can’t scoop yourself
- Video remains the ultimate delivery platform
 Responsible, next-gen journalism
- Updating, not backdating
- Synching your data
- Being informative without being intrusive
 “Developing coverage” is no excuse for lazy storytelling
Growing a winning news site
 Concentrate on customers, not competitors
- Audiences gravitate towards conversational media
- User-driven innovation
 Understand volume & scale
 Key elements
- Content, tools, search, community
- Compelling headlines as linkbait
 Leverage points
- Syndication, Multimedia, Deep interactivity, Mobility, Personalization, Stickiness
 Serve The Long Tail
We’ve changed the way
Guam gets its news
The Guam news value chain
Engineering
Infrastructure
Gathering
News
Developing
Content
Distributing
Data
We’re in the content business
We Create It
We Distribute It
We Archive It
We Share It
We Transform It
Guam business challenges
 Guam isn’t the epicenter of anything, much less high tech
- Many technologies don’t translate into sustainable local businesses
- Geographic separation hurts consumer products
 Local companies with sites don’t market effectively
 Most local (online) entrepreneurs
- Don’t think big or pragmatically
- Lack vision & a solid strategy
 Many Guam consumers aren’t technically sophisticated
- Limited consumer electronics, prohibitive costs
- Slow rate of adoption
 Guam is grossly deficient in computer science
- Philippines & Saipan both way ahead of us
Web revenue challenges
 Homegrown banner ad campaigns don’t work
 Reputation more important than beer money
- Obscurity a fate worse than death
 New media can’t subsidize traditional platforms
 Markets growing, but unproven
- Web video advertising, RSS ads
 The best innovation is born of common sense
We really “get” the Web
The KUAM Experience
KUAM Wireless
KUAM Broadband
KUAM.com
KUAM
Interactive
KUAM Desktop
KUAM Alerts
KUAM Web Tools
Seven Secrets to our Success
1. Branding
2. Innovation
3. 360-degree experiences
4. Philanthropy
5. Hiring very smart, very passionate people
6. We’re crazy enough to try anything once
7. We eat our own dog food
We know we can’t do this alone
Give it away, give it away now…
 All of our services are…free!
-
Access
Search
Streaming
Web services
Downloads
Membership
 Providing full-on & atomic access to content
- Live & archived newscasts
- Individual stories and exhibits
 Content delivery a la carte
Horror stories
 Users gaming KUAM Search
 Inappropriate user-generated content on Familiar
Faces
 AJAX atrocities
 Caching calamities
Anytime, anywhere, on any
device
News web site traffic
 Demand constant, access without cost
 Every story, segment, series & special we produce
has a URL
- …and most have an RSS feed, too
 Microchunking
- Tens of thousands tap our RSS feeds
- Thousands have downloaded our toolbar
- Hundreds use our JavaScript imports
- Many call our APIs
KUAM.com Traffic
KUAM.com
Web
RSS
APIs
Mobile
41%
47%
5%
7%
Multiplatform access
 World Wide Web
- Largest archive of online stories
- Unmetered search capability
 RSS
- Stories, reporter/columnist newsfeeds, photostreams
 Streaming, VOD, podcasts
- WAP devices, PDAs, Blackberries, Windows Mobile devices, smartphones
 Mobile video
- Alerts
 E-mail, SMS
 Desktop
- Widgets, toolbar
Desktop tools
 Free utilities to help you stay constantly connected
to KUAM, even if you’re not on KUAM.com
Attention Data
Tracking the Group Voice
 Content popularity as dictated by user behavior
 17% traffic boost
Real-time views
 Get up-to-the-second glimpses of what people are
researching with KUAM LiveSearch
Accelerated publishing volume
World-class work is born of
world-class challenges
A homegrown product
 We developed our own CMS - “Arpeggio”
- Publishing, administration, archival & syndication
- All content repurposed in multiple formats
- Lightning-fast, multiplatform responsiveness
 We upgrade all the time
 KUAM.com isn’t…
- A kit we bought
- A corporate mandate
- Some outsourcing gig
- An O&O offshoot or affiliate hand-me-down
Guam’s most decorated web site
 Gauging success
- Commercial profitability
- Audience approval
- Critical acclaim
 We’ve won an unprecedented
4 Edward R. Murrow Awards
- Best Regional News Web Site: 2005, 2006, 2007
- Best National News Web Site: 2006
- Very exclusive company
- WashingtonPost.com
- CourtTV.com
- NPR
We’ve been Web 2.0 for years
 User-generated content
- Community Commentary
 Social networks
- Familiar Faces
 XMLHTTP requests
- Decision 2002 election results
 RSS
- We’ve been syndicating data since 2003
 Multimedia
- Streaming video / embedded players were our calling card
 APIs / web services
- KUAM Developer Network
 Tag clouds
- KUAM LiveSearch
 Attention Data
- The Most
Traffic with a Web 2.0 twist
 Your bandwidth, someone else’s traffic
 Web servers supporting desktop HTTP transactions
 Being on the Internet means managing scale
 Page views
 RSS feeds
 Web service calls
 Flash UI presentations
 Desktop widgets
 Flash Video clips
 WAP pages
 Remote embedded videos
 AJAX-based polling & UIs
 Podcatcher clients
The Long Tail for news
Stories on KUAM.com (measured over 2 hours)
1400
1200
# of page requests
1000
800
600
The highest concentration of reading is at the head,
being current news articles immediately available.
Such content is found on our homepage, WAP site,
RSS feeds, e-mail/SMS alerts, in-page 'breaking
news' callouts, web service calls, external mashups,
etc.
Older stories in our back catalog make up a much
longer tail, having significantly less traffic but being
of much greater number in the aggregate.
Such stories are found via Google searches, our
internal search tool, external news services, e-mail
recommendations, client aggregators, deep linking,
or legacy browsing.
400
200
0
Current Stories (26 items)
Older stories (191 items)
We didn’t bring the Web to
Guam…we made it work
Guam’s most popular web site







Launched in 1997
Redesigned in 1999, 2002, 2006 & 2008
30,000+ articles
55,000+ user-submitted images
2,100+ daily search queries
8 GB video, 1 GB audio, 700 MB PDFs
68% of traffic from off-island
- 83% from U.S. mainland/Hawaii
 Average viewing session is 12 minutes, 33 seconds
- Users average 3.6 sessions per day
- Users visit 8.2 pages per session
 Among the region’s most-read publications
Version 1.0 (circa 1998)
Version 2.0 (circa 2000)
Version 3.0 (circa 2003)
Version 4.0 (2006)
So what’s next?
KUAM Mobile
 Mobile video
- Streaming presentations of your favorite KUAM shows
- Live TV
- Breaking news
 Wireless alerts
- Customized notification services
- Geography-specific push
- On demand information for your situation
Customized news
 Get local news exactly how you want it
- Have your own personalized portal with web widgets
- Rearrange our page to your liking
- Recommendation engine refers new content & functionality widgets
based on your choices
Globalization
 Multilingual translation engine renders news stories
in multiple languages
- English
- Chamorro
- Tagalog
- Japanese
Desktop RIAs
 Downloadable applications
-
News readers
Newstickers
Image galleries
RSS-powered screen savers
 Cross-platform
- Windows
- Mac OS
- Linux
 Offline access
- Doesn’t matter if you’re not connected to the ‘Net
 Work in places without Internet access
- In the car, on the plane
KUAM Developer Network
 Remix our stuff
- Data opened up to programmers
 Build cool tools & new value
- Personal, professional, academic
 Content licensing for premium access
Exhibits to take away
 Download!
- Slides and MP3 audio of today’s talk
- www.jasonsalas.com
- Get involved!
- KUAM.com Beta Community
- www.kuam.com/researchanddevelopment
 Register!
- KUAM Developer Network
- jason@kuam.com
Thanks for interacting
with KUAM!