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Newspapers to Use Links to Rivals on Web Sites
Caroline Little, chief of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, says links to other Web sites should help increase traffic to its own sites.
By BOB TEDESCHI
Want the latest news on Floyd Landis’s positive drug test from The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times or USA Today?
Soon, it will all be on Washingtonpost.com.
The Washington Post, The New York Sun and The Daily Oklahoman, in Oklahoma City, have contracted with an online news aggregator, Inform.com, to scan hundreds of news and blog sites and deliver content related to articles appearing on their Web sites, regardless of who published those articles. Links to those articles will appear in a box beside the site’s original article or within the text of the story.
Newspaper Web sites, which commonly post articles from sister publications, wire services and even blogs, have typically stopped short of providing generous doses of news from competitors. The move made by these papers is not a result of cooperation across the industry as it is a counterattack by publishers against Google and Yahoo, which have stolen readers and advertisers from newspapers in recent years, both with their search engines and their own news aggregation services.
“This lets us be a search engine,” said Kelly Dyer Fry, director of multimedia for Opubco Communications Group, which publishes the Oklahoman and its Web site, NewsOK.com. “We look at it like we just hired 30,000 journalists, because now we can give you our story and what the rest of the world is saying about it.”
The site’s roughly 700,000 registered users view about 36 million pages online each month, with each user viewing three to five pages per visit. And that is not enough to satisfy the demands of advertisers. Because Inform gives readers an easy way to find related stories that were published earlier on NewsOK.com, Ms. Fry said she expected the number of page views on the site to increase by at least threefold.
“People aren’t just reading one story,” she said. “They’ll click deeper because of this, and I can load ads deeper into those pages. It really beefs up the site.”
For a newspaper industry that has watched its advertisers flee to cable television, junk mail and Web sites like Google, Yahoo and Craigslist, online advertising revenues have become Topic A in boardrooms and newsrooms alike. While growing, these Web sales have not been enough to offset the cash lost to other media.
Online media outlets like Slate or Salon prominently feature their links to other sites and some, particularly blogs, are built around the strength of their links. But newspapers have been reluctant to direct readers outside their own gates. These deals with Inform are but one indication that newspapers may be reconsidering long-held beliefs about how to compete, and cooperate, with other publishers.
“Five years ago, everybody said you have to keep readers on your site, with no links out to other sites,” said Caroline H. Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the online division of the Washington Post Company. “But ultimately, people will go where they want to go.”
“To the extent we can provide them more Washington Post video or more information from around the Web, we’re all for it,” Ms. Little added. “And we get the benefit of that, too, because we get a lot of referrals from the Web, also.”
Inform, which is privately-held and based in New York, would not say how much revenue these deals were expected to generate. The company says it was able to convince publishers to try its linking service because newspapers had already seen success in putting up related content, but found no reliable or easy way to automate the process.
This, analysts say, is the selling point of services like Inform, which costs between a few thousand and tens of thousands of dollars monthly. A site like NewsOK.com attracts frequent users, but they only read a few pages per visit, hardly the kind of audience that will help newspapers replace revenues from their shrinking paper editions.
The amount of revenue gleaned from a newspaper’s Web site varies widely depending on the publication, but according to the Newspaper Association of America, 5.5 percent of the newspaper industry’s revenues come from their online divisions.
“Newspaper sites have a lot of rich content, but they have trouble helping people see all that’s there on their sites,” said Greg Sterling, an online media analyst. “This creates many more opportunities for readers to drill down on a topic, and that means more opportunities for advertising revenue.”
Web sites that already work with Inform, like the Daily Oklahoman’s Web site, surround stories with related links from the newspaper’s current edition and its archives, as well as links to related stories, videos, blogs, slide shows and podcasts from other sites. Links also appear in the text of stories.
For instance, a story last week about an injured Marine returning home to the state was mostly bordered by links to stories from the Daily Oklahoman about the war in Iraq. But links on the left of the story and highlighted words within the story also led to a list of articles from Newsweek, The New York Times and smaller regional publications, as well as blog postings.
These links did not whisk readers away to another site. They instead opened a new window in the browser with the new story so readers could keep their original NewsOK page up.
Ms. Little said the Washington Post Web site would begin using Inform’s service in September or October, and would initially surround its stories with related content from other Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive sites, like Slate.com, Newsweek.com and BudgetTravelOnline.com. After that, it would include links to stories from around the Web, possibly from other nationally-oriented newspapers.
There are instances where the Post’s Web site already links to stories from these competitors. For instance, in the online version of his “White House Briefing” column last week, Dan Froomkin included a link to a New York Times story from the previous week. According to Jim Brady, the executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, reporters or Web producers can insert links to another paper’s site when they see fit.
“We think it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. Brady said. “It seems limiting to tell people about something another news organization has reported and not point them to it. It goes against the Web’s DNA.”
But the Inform service will generate links automatically. To put a link within or near a story now (as Mr. Froomkin’s did), most publications must do so manually or at least review the link that its technology system has suggested. Inform’s technology scans each story from a client’s Web site as well as other content from the Web, then automatically inserts links on the client’s site. Inform also updates the links continuously to point readers to more recent content.
Inform’s executives said that competing publishers are generally pleased to be linked to, given that it helps attract readers they might not otherwise find.
The New York Times has no plans to use Inform, according to Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman. Ms. Mathis said the Web site planned to link to bloggers on various topics in the future, using technology from Blogrunner, which the Times bought last year for an undisclosed sum.
“So we have both of the elements of Inform,” Ms. Mathis said. Not only does the company link to related stories from within the Times organization, but “we have the ability to go outside and grab other high-quality information on related topics that would be useful to a reader.”
