Courant.com in the first person

I have some history with Courant.com.

I interned there in the summer of 1998 (specifically for the newspaper's web site), and I sometimes write and post stories to an adjunct web site, Connecticut Breaking News, which is hosted on the Courant's blog system, and featured on Courant.com during the week.  I have also scanned the breaking news sections of Courant.com during the day as a part of my job, looking for stories we may have missed, so we can take their ideas, and do our own reporting on them.

Over the last decade, the number of locally-produced stories posted during the day has gradually increased.

Back in 1998, Courant.com's online manager struggled to convince the writers to contribute perhaps a rough draft of a story they were working on, in time for the 3 pm e-mail update.  (This update still goes out, and the Courant makes some money off it by occasionally sending advertising messages to people who are on the list.)  The reporters resisted, because they wanted the stories to be fresh in the next morning's paper, and not get picked up by radio and TV once they were posted on the web.

For several years in the mid-2000's, many of the reporters got over this, and posted early versions of many of their stories online, with edited, or more full versions of their stories in the next day's newspaper.

In the last year or two, with the Courant's staff having shrunken, the quick-hit online stories often run with no edits or new information in the next day's printed paper.  I suspect this is simply because each remaining reporter has more to cover, so they spend less time on each story.

This year, the kinds of breaking news stories the Courant puts on its web site have also changed.  They seem to be trying to generate a greater number of breaking news stories.  This means they tend to do a lot of the kind of car crash journalism you see on radio and TV: Stories rewritten from a police department or state agency press release, rather than some meaty issue or controversy.  I have written zillions of these stories myself, but it is a noticeable change for the Courant.

I suspect the objective at many online publications is to grow readership (page views, unique visitors, however they want to describe it), and this need is probably a major influence on what is seen on the site.  Courant.com itself brags to potential advertisers about the size of its online readership, and offers details about their demographics.

In addition to the usual articles, Courant.com uses several strategies to try to increase its readership, most of which I have seen at other news sites:

Breaking News:
Posting more stories during the day, to get hard-core news users to come back during the day.  The focus seems to be on the 9 am to 4 pm office workers, who check the news while sitting at the computer at work.  I suspect this approach gets news junkies to check in constantly.  Unfortunately, because less time is invested in each story, the stories are less likely to generate hits by grabbing people's interest and going viral (like the photo of lawmakers playing solitare).  I'm not sure if the Courant people have thought about this trade-off to focusing on breaking news, or if they realized it would make their content more like radio and TV, and less like a newspaper.

Recommend this story:
The Courant puts social media links on its stories, so you can e-mail them, recommend an article to a web site, or get it shown more prominently on news recommendation sites.  As the Pew Report mentioned, a relatively small percentage of users go to the ranking sites, but I suspect they may be people who read a lot of online news.

Comments:
This is where newspapers try to get into the social media scene by 'building online communities,' as they say.  The users generate their own hits for the site by commenting, responding to others' comments, and reading the comments.  Based on the posts at Courant.com and several other newspaper sites in Connecticut, I suspect the papers spend relatively little time guiding the discussion, or looking at it.  I understand the nature of the internet is free flowing discussion, but the posts often get nasty at crime victims, or non-public people who had something happen to them, and sometimes veer into borderline racism.  Sometimes angry diatribes start because somebody didn't read the whole article before posting.  I wonder why some newspaper sites seem to attract so many trolls?

ITowns:
An extension of the comments, but pushed out on their own.  This largely seems to be press releases or announcements that didn't make it as news stories, or were simply too old.  This sort of site could draw in the friends and relatives of people who post.  The users provide the content, and I suspect it costs next to nothing to run, so even if the hits are low, maybe it could make a little money.  Right now, when I look in my town of Plainville, I see regular Courant articles, but no ITowns reader-submitted material.

Sex:
Courant.com usually includes photo galleries that focus on, for lack of a better term, hot chicks.  I suspect these come from some central office at Tribune (the company that owns the Courant) or some news service, as they seem to be all wire photos.  At the moment there are photo galleries on the home page titled "A Century of Sex Symbols," and "NFL Cheerleaders."  (Which also includes beach volleyball cheerleaders.  Wearing short shorts.)

Management at the Courant recently shifted to an executive who also oversees Fox 61.  I suspect the upper tiers of management now have more TV experience.  Looks and breaking news are more a part of the TV universe, so I am not surprised they have become bigger parts of Courant.com.