News site prepares marketing launch

For months now, Alexandra Wharton and students in her global online marketing course at the Missouri School of Journalism have been sowing the Internet with chat and commentary contrived to draw users to a new online video news service, Newsy.com.

In the newsroom a block from the J-School, teams of professional journalists and students have been putting together video newscasts for the beta version of the Web site, which came online in late September.

They focus on fresh national and international stories, such as world reaction to the inauguration of President Obama and a cease fire in the Gaza Strip, and they make video newscasts that include multiple sources to provide wider perspective.

The inauguration story used video clips from a French TV channel and snippets from China Daily, Russia Today and Tehran Times. The Gaza fighting story included information from the Al Jazeera TV network, FOX News, NBC, the Palestine Information Center and a German online site.

A news anchor videotaped in the Newsy.com studio introduces each segment, provides a summary and a general question at the end and then asks viewers to comment on the story.

Now that Newsy.com has worked out its startup bugs, compiled an archive of videos and reached what President Jim Spencer calls a critical mass of viewers, the news site plans to launch its nontraditional marketing campaign next week.

Spencer cites statistics from eMarketer, PermissionTV, ComScore Metrics, Nielsen and other sources to back his argument that Newsy.com is offering the right news product at the right time and will draw enough advertising revenue to turn a profit:

• More people are getting their news online than through newspapers, and the percentage of households that have watched video streamed through a browser increased from 32 percent in 2007 to 63 in 2008. The most popular category of online video content in 2007 was news and current events.
• Video ad spending growth will run counter to overall economic trends, rising a projected 45 percent in 2009. A sharp increase of professional video content on the Web, mainly from TV networks, is creating a viable base for brand marketers. In one survey asking companies about their online marketing budgets in 2009, 70 percent of respondents said they would focus on online video, a much higher percentage than social media, search engines, podcasts and webcasts and banner ads.

“Newsy finds itself in a high-growth market, with content that appears to be the most popular and a revenue stream that is growing,” Spencer said. “Our team must come up with an economically viable way to produce content and attract an audience.”

Spencer and Wharton said the huge shift in the way people get their news requires a shift away from
standard marketing tactics and a focus on Web 2.0, the newest phase of Internet use in which the public is involved in managing content and building communities to help process information.

Wharton said they plan to use some traditional public relations, such as writing e-mails with Web links to reporters about Newsy, and newly popular methods such as Internet search marketing.

But they also plan to reach out to influential bloggers and try to get them to write about Newsy.

Other methods they’re already using are “stealth” and “non-stealth” marketing that taps into the popularity of online community messaging within sites such as Crooks & Liars, Talking Points Memo, Huffington Post, Partisan Cheese and Mashable. Another target site is Del.icio.us, which enables consumers to bookmark and tag content that interests them and get insight into the tagging of others.

Students join online communities and gain credibility by offering thoughtful commentary and contributing content, such as links to articles they find interesting. After “establishing themselves,” Wharton said, they promote Newsy and help drive traffic to the site, which makes it more valuable to advertisers.

For example, one post on a popular social media site by Caitlin Short, a student who uses the alias Cait_Monster, drove 299 people to the Newsy site, Wharton said. Short wrote a message on Reddit.com, a Web site that allows users to share information about news and trends about Newsy’s coverage of the scandal involving Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich scandal. She commented on Newsy’s comparison of how Fox News and MSNBC had significantly different approaches to the story when it first broke. Another posting on the Blagojevich story, made by student Jackie Mejia on the political site, Pajamas Media, drove 30 people to the site.

While the blogosphere does seem to be picking up on the presence of Newsy.com, most of the site’s online references thus far appear to be from students and employees working for the site. In an effort to get the word out about Newsy.com, posts on news outlets’ comment boards, from the Dallas Morning News to Fox, reference Newsy’s coverage of a particular story and provide a link to the site. Many of the posts’ authors have online aliases suggesting a connection to MU or Columbia.

However, some online forums do appear to have posts from non-affiliates of Newsy. For instance, reddit.com, a Web site that allows users to share information about new online trends and sites, had two posts about Newsy’s coverage of the Blagojevich scandal. Both commented on Newsy’s comparison of how Fox News and MSNBC had significantly different approaches to the story when it first broke.