Star-Telegram seeing reader growth in transition to digital content

By Jim Witt

jwitt@star-telegram.com

Not sure how I'll occupy myself today. The Cowboys' season is done -- again -- and I'm not really interested in the playoff games.

I was rooting for the Saints on Saturday because I like QB Drew Brees and coach Sean Payton.

I played golf with Payton one time when he was a coach for Dallas and came away impressed. He's extremely smart and personable; too bad Jerry let him get away.

One thing Payton did after winning the 2009 Super Bowl stuck with me: Before the next season began, he gathered his players together and had a New Orleans-style jazz funeral to "bury" results from the previous year.

He knew his team needed to fight the tendency to relax after achieving success.

I stole the idea and gathered Star-Telegram editors late last year to "bury" our perceptions (both good and bad) about the Star-Telegram for us to move into a future where digital content -- conveying information to readers on their computers, smartphones and tablets -- needs to play a much bigger role in our continued success.

We still have a lot of readers who prefer print, of course, but digital is the fast-growing part of our business in terms of eyeballs meeting content.

We grew digital traffic to our websites in 2011 by more than 25 percent compared with 2010 owing to a variety of factors, including redesigned sports sections, a wider reach through social media and an increase in daily digital content.

We expect our transition to digital to accelerate now that we've moved into our "newsroom of the future," which was designed with input from the digital staff to emphasize digital and breaking news.

Our Twitter followers increased by almost 130 percent last year, and our Facebook fans grew by 153 percent. The number of newsroom employees with Twitter accounts has jumped from 25 to more than 100.

(Twitter handles are found at the end of every story or column they write. Following your favorite reporters and columnists is a great way to stay on top of topics that interest you.)

Efforts to provide additional multiplatform content for our dfw.com (entertainment) and dfwVarsity (high school sports) sites also paid off in huge growth.

Traffic to dfw.com grew 140 percent year-over-year, and dfwVarsity traffic jumped 43.5 percent.

Thanks in part to these niche sites, the Star-Telegram's overall local audience digital traffic ranges from 53 to 55 percent. Most newspapers sites don't do nearly that well.

Local traffic is what advertisers like to see, because those people are more likely to buy their goods or services.

Stories about the Dallas Cowboys always draw lots of readers to our website, but many of them are people outside our market. We're glad to have people access our content from anywhere in the world, but they're empty calories when it comes to generating revenue.

The Cowboys bring a significant local audience, but they probably would not be among the top five most-read stories every day without those out-of-market readers.

If digital is going to be our future, mobile is going to be a significant part of that. More and more people are accessing our journalism through smartphones and tablets.

We've seen mobile jump to more than 11 percent of our total traffic, and the forecast is for continued rapid increases.

We have mobile and iPad apps that replicate the newspaper layout, and our parent company (McClatchy) is developing a true iPad app that should make reading on a tablet even more enjoyable.

I enjoy reading The New York Times on my iPad more than its print edition. Tablets won't "save" the newspaper industry, but they are an important development in helping us transfer the experience of reading from print to digital.

The biggest question we face is how we're going to revamp our revenue model.

Advertising has traditionally paid for the bulk of our expenses, but that has to change dramatically. Digital users and readers will eventually have to pay to access content.

Our job is to make that content so compelling and unique that readers are convinced it's worth it.

Jim Witt is executive editor and senior vice president of the Star-Telegram

817-390-7704

Twitter: @jimelvis

Looking for comments?