First from Radio-Info.com:
“It took us two years to beat a 175-year-old newspaper” with a new online paper.
Tom Davis and his two stations are all about Williamsburg-Yorktown, VA – and so is “WYDaily.com”, staffed by savvy local journalists. (“Don’t hire radio people for this”, says Davis). He says they’ve beaten the local printed paper in a short time by reaching 54% market penetration. They’re blowing through sales goals, "pacing up 27% this year, and we have already reached our third quarter goal.” Furthermore, he insists that WYDaily “has not cannibalized one dollar from our radio stations.” Davis clearly agrees with Fisher CEO Colleen Brown that it’s good to “share” with others, and here’s part of what he’s got – Davis cares about “TSC, not TSL.” That’s “Time Spent Connected” to any of the Davis/Tide properties, whether broadcast or Internet (“we don’t care” which one). He believes that “digital platforms require a driver, and radio stations are a perfect driver...Want to know more about the news story you just heard on the air? Go to the online newspaper. We say that over and over.” But Davis warns that you can’t phone it in – “you have to be local, do it local, have local people.” Would this work other places? “You can do it in any market where the local daily newspaper is under siege, which is…all of them.” WYDaily even links to Craigslist, the newspaper classified-killer. By the end of the panel, the RAB’s Jeff Haley, situated between Davis and Erik Hellum, says “if we could bottle” what they’re doing “that’s at least $1 billion in incremental revenue for radio.”
And the actual website is here.
Looks pretty cool.
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