Friday, May 27, 2011

KPBS: continuous, strong growth, based on News

Apart from Minnesota Public Radio and WBUR, the station that has demonstrated the strongest, continuous improvement in online news traffic is KPBS in San Diego. Its performance may mean more to public stations around the country than the successes of MPR or WBUR, because those two stations are often assumed to maintain a permanent head start.

Monthly visits to KPBS’s website have almost quadrupled in three years. Monthly pageviews have tripled in the same time from 277,000 to 824,000 per month, with 60 percent of the growth coming from increased viewing of news pages (a tenfold jump, from 31,000 to 346,000).

When asked about the factors leading to these improvements, Tammy Carpowich, director of interactive strategy at KPBS, pointed first to personnel changes that came in 2006. “We moved four full-time positions from different departments and reassigned them to new media. That change resulted in an increase of our visits by about 125 percent.”

The second factor driving improved performance was technical. In 2009 KPBS installed Ellington, a sophtisticated news publishing system built by the online news team at the Lawrence Journal-World, led by online news pioneer Rob Curley. Even though the previous content management system was adequate, Ellington dramatically improved the search optimization of KPBS news stories, which led to a substantial gain in search-driven visits.

The third, most recent factor propelling KPBS’s growth in online news has been hiring Suzanne Marmion as news director.

Marmion orchestrated the final steps toward a true web-broadcast newsroom convergence and brought a new sensibility to editorial selection. Leng Caloh, convergence editor for KPBS, explained it this way: Marmion “took feedback about the types of stories that did really well ... and responded to the desire for breaking news on our site.”

Similar influences drive the growth at these three active news sites — WBUR, MPR and KPBS: increased staffing, investments in appropriate technology and constant attention to user interests. What may be most impressive is that the traffic growth at the three sites has been fueled by local news collected and posted by station reporters. The provision of national news from the NPR database has been far less important, at least so far, than the increased volume of local news produced within “the converged newsrooms.”

What these stations are demonstrating is that public broadcasters can build an audience for multiplatform news production if senior management provides the resources and the news teams have strong leadership.