Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

June 1, 2015

Last week we observed the men and women behind the curtain entering content during severe weather coverage.  There is yet another curtain behind the first curtain. And you don't pull the curtain to reveal the wizards, you walk downstairs. You should pay attention.

Richard Cox is the director of new media operations over the people who design and build the websites for KOTV in Tulsa and KWTV in Oklahoma City.  So, the web producers upstairs enter content about daily news, weather and sports.  The web tech people downstairs build the functionality, interface and appearance.

First we talked about science fiction books because Richard has had three syfy books published to good reviews but no riches, yet.  I've written a screenplay about the world's most famous UFO scientist, not published, not a dime.

After squandering time for about fifteen minutes, we got down to what we were actually here for.

Richard said their websites had doubled page views since last May. Doubled.  Another manager told me that the NewsOn6 website had more page views than all the other Tulsa TV websites together. All the other TV news websites plus the Tulsa World newspaper. What?  I greatly admire the newspaper's website for having a vast number of stories present and past.  But the Tulsa World is not known for video, even though they have quite a bit, and they are not known for severe weather or breaking news coverage.  TV has a giant advantage in these areas.

Richard Cox next clicked into Google analytics which track every interaction viewers have with every part of the web page every minute.  Remember the severe weather in Tulsa last Friday?  KOTV had more than 400-thousand page views.  News9 in Oklhahoma City had had a much bigger weather event a couple of weeks before with tornadoes and severe flooding in the OKC metro. KWTV had more than a million pages views.

Everyone credits owner David Griffin for his vision years ago when the web was losing money. Griffin put his money where his vision was.  He believed the web would make money if he invested in the infrastructure and hired enough people to keep it constantly updated with new content.  Other stations are lucky to have half the web staff in this building, and I'm just talking the web producers upstairs, not the web designers downstairs.  I don't know what to think of that kind of resources in- house.  So, everyone says the investment in new media is paying off.  I don't know if the number$ will be shared with me, but I'm going to ask how much money web and new media make.


...............

Note:  My thousand-mile ascent through new media is best understood if you start with earlier posts. I suggest starting with post titled:  "First Revelation:  Smartphone Video."