Star Tribune takes personalized approach to Web

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune is the very model of a modern major metro.

It’s already the city’s dominant mass medium through its printed product. But now it’s exploiting its online presence to give its readers and advertisers a more personal experience, said Jason Erdahl, the Star Tribune’s executive director of interactive media operations.

Case in point: The Home Page Experience ad program, launched in 2006. The program gives marketers an opportunity to reach Web visitors through a variety of ad formats based on the number of times a visitor accesses the paper’s home page.

“What’s worked for us is that the user sees the message in different ways as they come back to the front page,” Erdahl said. This minimizes the chance a consumer might ignore the ad because of repeated viewings of the same message, he said.

The paper (Monday-Friday, 335,443; Saturday, 372,657; Sunday, 570,443) listed the ad packages at $19,000 each and booked 50 last year.

Home Page Experience reflects the paper’s embrace of the Web, a commitment that netted the daily three NAA Digital Edge awards this year for most innovative storytelling, best local guide/entertainment site (see box, below) and best digital ad program.

That’s on top of the four regional Emmys the paper garnered from the local chapter of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, citing the Star Tribune’s animation, still photography and videography efforts.

Yet even as the paper built its award-winning programs, its staff had to contend with rebuilding its Web infrastructure from scratch following the 2006 sale of the Star Tribune from McClatchy Co. to private venture firm Avista Capital Partners.

“McClatchy had the Web operations set up so that everything was centralized through the parent company,” Erdahl said. “McClatchy did a fine job, but this gave us an opportunity to look at things again and we decided to go with the best-of-breed option.”

The answer was a mixture of shrink-wrapped and custom apps, Erdahl said.

To that end, the Star Tribune tapped Clickability Inc. for its content management software and Silverpop Systems Inc. for its e-mail and newsletter alert functionality. The newspaper also maintained and expanded relationships with vendors such as Planet Discover, which was selected to provide search engine and shopping portal support.

Finally, the paper renewed its contract with Omniture Inc. for Web analytics and installed an ad management app from Google Inc. unit DoubleClick.

“The site may not look entirely different but nearly everything has been dramatically changed,” Erdahl said about the new infrastructure.

The Star Tribune used its own resources, meantime, to create its popular story commenting feature.

“I would argue that we have the best story commenting system on the Web right now,” he said. “We do require registration, but that doesn’t stop (readers) from participating because our users are open to sharing information with us in exchange for posting on the Web.”

Users can rate comments similar to the way Amazon users rate reviews, Erdahl said.

Local-minded features

Earlier this year, the Star Tribune launched Politically Connected, a site where users can find more information on national, state and local election races. Erdahl expects the site to draw considerable traffic, particularly since Minneapolis is hosting this year’s Republican National Convention.

“We aggregate news and information from throughout the Web and our own content,” Erdahl said. The site will also track campaign financing and contributors, he said.

MyVote, an app that allows users to quickly find precinct information and learn about ballot issues, bolsters the Star Tribune’s local campaign coverage.

“As election night approaches (voters) can print out a ballot and choose who they like and bring it to the voting booth,” Erdahl said about MyVote’s capabilities.

“Then throughout the night, through the same interface, they can monitor how all the elections are going, personalized to their specific street address.”

Last month it also unveiled a watchdog blog, dubbed Whistleblower, showcasing the Star Tribune’s investigative reporting efforts. Readers can also use the blog to register their own complaints and concerns.

The Star Tribune’s site continues to have its most popular and most e-mailed stories on the front page, which are aggregated from the entire site. But with the Clickability content management app, will be able to offer the most popular stories and most e-mailed stories by specific section.

Interactive features also receive prominent display on the home page. Users can play videos or view blogs by accessing a scrolling slide-show box displayed on the right-hand side of the page.

“We have an organization committed to multimedia and some really talented videographers that work for the digital media team,” he said, citing as proof the four regional Emmys the newspaper won in 2007.

Mobile news distribution is another key component of the Star Tribune’s interactive efforts. News and information is tailored to enable users to quickly view the data they need on their mobile devices, Erdahl said, but consumers can also opt to view entire stories and articles if they wish.

“Running a long story is not conducive for a mobile device but people (may want to access) movie showtimes or go in to read certain stories,” Erdahl said. “We don’t have to replicate our entire Web site on the phone, but if you want to, you should be able to find and view that entire long story” even if it is 16 characters at a time, he said.

“You should still have that option.”

The Star Tribune’s mobile news package includes quick links to main story sections and stories about the Twin Cities’ four professional sports teams. Users can scroll down on their mobile devices to see top local and national stories.

Consumers also have the option to sign up for e-mail alerts and can subscribe to up to 20 individual newsletters transmitted to their PCs.

“We have a daily AM and PM newsletter we send to a couple hundred thousand people and have specific newsletters about the Twins, Vikings, business and a variety of other subjects,” Erdahl said. “We also have a lot of really great offers that we send out as well as on behalf of our advertisers for travel, entertainment, automotive and many others.”

The paper has plans for additional categories aimed at tapping into readers’ diverse tastes and interests.

“As we look at the categories of content on our site — not calling them sections — let’s just call the Minnesota Twins a category,” he said. “Heck, we should do that for ice fishing. Up here in Minnesota we should own ice fishing,” Erdahl said.

Group marketing

The Star Tribune is also digitizing and categorizing its archives in a bid to further slice and dice the market, Erdahl said.

As part of that initiative, the paper is relaunching a health and fitness category containing stories published since 1986.

Erdahl said the Star Tribune wants to create categories that meet the needs of various age groups and interests.

“I want all demographics. There is no limit, I want anyone who can pick up a cell phone and type something on their phone,” he said. “My 6-year-old son is a demographic. I want him to go on the site as he’s learning to read.”

StarTrib uses vita.mn power to grow stronger

The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune has a built-in digital proving ground to test features and services it rolls out on its Web site.

The paper’s local entertainment Web site, vita.mn, was used to work out bugs associated with its homegrown commenting application and the Star Tribune also used the site to test its Karma user rewards program.

Karma rewards registered users with points every time they participate or review material on the site. Top point earners win a prize.

Vita.mn contains information about Twin Cities restaurants, bars, clubs, movies, music, art, guides and other entertainment events.

A printed counterpart contains other information, including a mix of staff and user-contributed material.

Among the most popular features within the site is the Top 10 list, said Jason Erdahl, the Star Tribune’s executive director of interactive media operations.

Last year, he said, users wrote more than 10,000 Top 10 lists on more than 800 topics, which resulted in traffic counts exceeding 1.9 million page views, he said. Users viewing the lists stay on the site longer than the usual startribune.com visitor, he said.

“Users spend more time there because they are adding lists, tagging items, commenting and uploading photos for the site,” he said.

Karma, meantime, will migrate from vita.mn to the main startribune.com site later this year.

“We believe that the loyalty programs for Web and print should be merged,” Erdahl said. “If someone subscribes to the newspaper, big points. If someone subscribes to a newsletter, good points and if someone tags an item, good points,” he said.

Vita.mn won a Digital Edge for best local guide/entertainment site.