By Toby Collodora, WCCO-TVBig Idea: "The Wire" | WCCO-TV/WCCO.COMGoals: We have four main goals for this project: Be local, create an interactive way for users to get their news and connect with our brand, increase engagement metrics, translate a younger Web audience into a TV audience and, of course, make new money.
The Concept: "The Wire" started as a much larger concept focused around user-generated content and viewer interaction. As we started to work on the larger concept, we decided that we had to bite off a part and find out what it really took to develop a Web site and a full concept from scratch. Also, it's expensive to develop -- and a full, expansive site could be outdated by launch.
- "The Wire" shows 72 hours: yesterday, today and tomorrow. There's a vertical blue line that shows a user the current time. Multi-colored "bubbles" are plotted on a horizontal plane, representing the type of story and the time the story was posted. The line moves throughout the day, and viewers can zoom back to see what's just popped now, what happened this morning and what happened yesterday. The "tomorrow" area shows upcoming news and events.
- "The Wire" initially will showcase three areas: news, "buzz" and events. News is exactly how it sounds, as our newsroom learns about it throughout the day. "Buzz" is an area we created to peel back some of the layers and make ourselves more transparent. We will publish information not only about us and what we're doing but what we find interesting, or even funny, that day. (Like a sneezing panda.) Events are the client-based money-makers. They'll be judiciously sold but provide a steady stream of income. Users will be able to comment on the news and "buzz" content types, which we hope will provide our newsroom with invaluable information during breaking news and weather events.
- In order to get "Wire" users to also come back and watch our television broadcasts, we've created the "flagged for broadcast" concept. When we see comments that we like, we mark them with a flag to let users know that they'll be able to see what they had to say in our television broadcast that evening.
- Users will access "The Wire" through a continually-updated widget on the traditional wcco.com, at least initially. Someday, we hope to develop widgets to place in the spaces where people are spending their time, with the hope of enticing them into our space. We also hope to turn "The Wire" into a portal that local users will want to make their homepage for the latest in everything interesting locally. We won't hesitate to link to other sites, even our competitors' sites, if that means people return and trust us to be the initial vetters of content. (Think a local Drudge Report.)
The Development: Development for this project has not been traditional. We did all of the creative and design work in-house and partnered with a local development firm, Sierra Bravo, to do the development work. Sierra Bravo helped us create a proof-of-concept with the understanding that all of that work would be done so that it could be used in the final product. We also created a seven-minute sales tape and are taking both of those things to clients to help sell the product. We will use money from clients to finish the development work on the final project. We partnered with the digital group within our corporation to help us build the back-end piece. As part of this, we have struggled with the cost of using outside resources versus the "cost" of using internal resources.
The People: "The Wire" will be managed by our current staff, without adding additional resources.
The Money: Our sales team is really excited about this new product because they've never had anything like it before. We're hoping to have a couple of large sponsors for the entire project and will supplement that money with a smaller, but regular, stream of client-based events.
Food For Thought: - What are the journalistic implications of having editorial tied so closely with sold content?
- Should we allow people to influence news coverage in a real-time environment?
- How should we use social networks to get people interested and back to our money-generating site?
