News Publishing Co., the Rome-based regional news and advertising company and owner of the Rome News-Tribune, is partnering with several national Internet companies to bolster its growing multimedia division.

The partnerships aim to create a dynamic online marketplace using romenews-tribune.com and other NPCo Web sites as portals in conjunction with its print newspapers.

“These partnerships will allow us to develop a regional marketplace for jobs, autos and real estate through a user-friendly entry point,” said Otis M. Raybon, NPCo vice president of operations and Rome News-Tribune publisher.

On Friday, the company launched its partnership with online job-database powerhouse Monster.com.

Monster.com is one of the most recognized brands on the Internet, known globally for its extensive job database and career-building resources.

NPCo plans to use its oongawah.com Web site as a marketplace portal for Monster and its other commerce, news and advertising partnerships.

Monster.com representatives were in Rome last week for brand and sales training for Rome News-Tribune employees.

Monster sales trainer Marc Gallucci said the value for the hometown newspaper is that “it gives additional tools to classified ad reps to offer recruitment solutions to advertisers so it’s not a one size fits all.”

“The value to Monster,” he said, “is that the newspaper has a presence going back 165 years, and we’ve been around since 1994. So we can’t re-create that. This helps us with our presence in the local community.”

Rome News-Tribune Classified Manager Cecilia Crow echoed that sentiment noting the partnership means that many more Northwest Georgia job postings will now be part of Monster’s database giving employers broader exposure and jobseekers more listings to search both online and in print.

That’s the goal of the initiative — to create print/online packages that benefit employers looking for qualified job candidates and to give area job seekers access to job opportunities and career tools.

“I am excited that we are partnering with Monster, the No. 1 recruitment Web site. Through the co-branded Web site — oongawah.monster.com — we will be able to offer the tools and the results needed in today’s market for employers and employment seekers alike,” said Crow.

Another new initiative is the Oongawah Marketplace that has been developed with Matchbin. NPCo and Matchbin have been partnering in the development of a community-oriented Web site platform.

NPCo will launch the multimedia Marketplace in early 2009. It is an online business directory that will include businesses from as far north as Hamilton County in Tennessee and as far south as Paulding County in Northwest Georgia.

It’s a searchable business database with basic information about businesses. Businesses can then pay for enhancements to their listings, ranging from adding photos and additional information to creating a customized Web page for your business.

The Marketplace will offer exposure, referral and marketing tools to businesses, but will also provide a comprehensive and searchable regional resource to consumers looking for goods and services.

And it puts it all at their fingertips online.

NPCo President Burgett H. Mooney III said, “The online marketplace and tools are a perfect complement to our print products.”

Keys to houses and cars

Another new partner coming on board in early 2009 will Neybor.com, a centralized marketing and services platform for buyers and sellers of real estate.

Neybor.com says more than 90 percent of buyers use the Internet as their primary tool for finding a home.

Neybor.com co-founder Paul Rodman called the partnership mutually beneficial “because we’re able to offer an enhancement to the newspaper’s real estate classified ads and to give tools to Realtors and others. Real estate is very local so it works well for the newspapers to be a hub and for us to be able to put information out of the Web through enhanced technology.”

Branded locally as oongawah.neybor.com, it will allow users to create single-property Web sites that showcase a homes’ special characteristics. Users can post photos and videos, include neighborhood and community lifestyle information and much more.

Rodman said the program “helps buyers target what they are looking for. We push the neighborhood aspect (thus our name). People are not just buying a house, they’re buying a lifestyle, and this is a way to get to know about neighborhoods too.”

“This will allow us to build a real estate marketplace on our Web site, making it easier for home buyers,” said Mike Schuttinga, advertising director for the Rome News-Tribune. “It will be an aggregator of houses on the market.”

For auto fans G4 Connect’s Auto Privileges may be the key to a new car. That’s another partnership in the works that should launch in 2009.

G4 Connect is an innovative online program that uses “game-like interactive Web sites and advergaming user interfaces.” Marketing, advertising and media companies partner with G4 to engage consumers who participate in interactive iNetwork activities and earn points. The goal is to help companies “engage, build and monetize their audiences online.”

The personalized online interactions allows consumers to explore their interests and participate in activities through gaming experiences and earn points. Those points can translate into value for consumers in the way of prizes such as possible discounts on car purchases.

All part of the plan

The latest online initiatives are part of a growth strategy kicked off in December 2006, when the company decided to expand its online offerings with video and other new media features to complement its print newspapers and magazines.

To that end the company recruited former Roman Jim Alred to return to Rome to head up the NPCo New Media Department.

In the two years since Alred’s arrival, the online presence of romenews-tribune.com and all of the NPCo Web sites have increased traffic and offerings to local readers and advertisers.

“We’ve seen Rome page views grow by leaps and bounds going from around 800,000 page views to now averaging over 1.3 million views a month. For the company as a whole we’ve grown from just over 1.1 million page views to now averaging more than 2.3 million page views a month,” said Alred.

But another growth indicator — unique visitors — pleases Alred even more.

“This is a really exciting statistic because we’ve seen unprecedented growth here. Rome has grown from around 35,000 unique visitors to a new high of 93,000 uniques in October 2008. NPCo sites have also grown incredibly from well under 100,000 total unique visitors to now hitting over 207,000 unique visitors per month.”

A unique visitor is one visitor coming to a site or a page during a defined period of time. A reader may visit the site numerous times every day for an entire month but only gets counted once. The best indicators on uniques are done monthly, quarterly or yearly. “Reporting daily unique visitors is worthless because a site may well have 800 unique visitors a day but only get 1,000 for the entire month,” said Alred.

The time users spend on a site is an important stat for Web sites because it shows how long readers are actually staying on a site.

“In December 2006, Rome was sitting at about 2 minutes for time on site whereas in October 2008 our site boasted a 5:55 time on site. This means people not only come to our sites, but they stay there and read the content.”

In the world of Web traffic, numbers get tossed around in a variety of ways and don’t always accurately reflect site usage. NPCo and other reputable companies who trade on their traffic want to show independently verified numbers to their customers and rely on industry standards tools such as Google Analytics. That way customers know what they’re paying for is verified independently, just like newspaper circulation is verified.

“Google Analytics is one of the big three industry standard analytic tools. It’s the easiest to implement and it’s free. This is not just some jolly Joe reporting tool like many sites try to pass off as legitimate. When I get calls from national advertisers interested in placing ads on our sites they don’t ask for our analytic numbers they ask for our Google Analytics numbers.” He says local advertisers should demand the same.

Online video explosion

Since Alred’s area of expertise was video production, he heralded NPCo’s evolution into true multimedia news, information and advertising.

In the past two years, the New Media team has shot and produced more than 2,000 videos.

Video was taken to a whole new level when the company launched Gridiron Central, a Web-based video program showcasing all things high school football.

Last year, Gridiron Central was very popular and was the fourth most-viewed Web site in the company. This year, the site is the No. 2 site in the company and has drawn in more than 56,000 unique visitors since the relaunch in August and has drawn more than 600,000 page views with an average time on site of 5:45.

Alred says the response from the community has been rewarding.

“The feedback has been great. Players, fans, coaches, referees and others have sent e-mails, called us and stopped us on the sidelines just to talk about high school sports and the show. Our aim from the very beginning was to bring a high school football show with high production values and great content to the Rome area. The cool part about the show is we’re still just scratching the surface of what we can do. I can’t wait to revamp this thing and up the game even more for next season.”

Alred wants to continue to build on the video presence he’s helped create.

“As much as some pundits still want to believe it’s nothing more than a gimmick, our videos have drawn more than 1.4 million unique views. In October alone our video server saw more than 1.75 terabytes of traffic. In the bandwidth world, a terabytes is equal to 1,000 gigabytes.

“We continue to have photo slideshows, comments on stories, timely updates through the day and the best multimedia coverage in the state.”

Alred is quick to point out that the new-media development is not a one-man show. He has created a successful internship program that has a waiting list for college students who want to be trained as multimedia journalists. In collaboration with local colleges, interns have not only helped create new content for the local community, they’ve become an integral part of the news staff.

“I’m very proud of how we’ve used the local resources and talent to help produce a lot of this content. I’ve had five interns from Berry College and one from Shorter College, and they all have done an amazing job. In fact, Ross McDuffie, now a co-host for Gridiron Central, and a full-time multimedia producer was an intern as was Tricia Dillard, now a full-time multimedia producer. So too was Elizabeth Cady, now the Rome News-Tribune’s education reporter. I hope to go out in the community and maybe even use high school talent to help us produce some of our content in the coming year."

Goal: Continue to improve, diversify

The partnership with Matchbin originated when NPCo wanted to upgrade its community Web sites throughout Northwest Georgia and Northeast Alabama. Several of the sites affiliated with NPCo community newspapers have already made the switch to the Matchbin platform.

Romenews-tribune.com’s switch is tentatively slated for spring 2009.

“The Rome site continues in development and will launch this spring. I can’t give too much away, but we have some big plans for the site and for our continued multimedia presence in the community,” Alred said.

While there’s a lot of emphasis in online development, it is just one piece of the NPCo business model that has been shifting over the past few years.

While print advertising was once newspapers’ primary source of revenue, NPCo has made a concerted effort to diversify its business strategy through commercial printing of other newspapers and products; direct-mail marketing; delivery of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, U.S.A. Today and Wall Street Journal in the region; publication of magazines and other niche products and its online offerings, all available in conjunction with its legacy business of publishing community newspapers throughout the region.

“That means our advertisers have numerous ways to reach customers and that readers have several different platforms in which they can get news, information and advertising,” said Raybon. “With all the headlines of economic woe of late, not only for our industry but for most industries, it’s imperative that we continue to diversify what we do and how we do it.

“It’s the smart thing to do for our company and for our community.”

Place classified ads online

You can create your own classified ad through News Publishing Co.’s new online order entry system.

The Rome News-Tribune and all NPCo newspapers now offer the improved interactive feature.

Classifieds Manager Cecilia Crow said the new service, which launched Thursday, allows anyone wanting to place a classified ad to do so online and to customize it.

You can write the ad text, add your own images as well as yellow highlighting. You’ll get a price and pay online. Then it appears in print and online on the dates you requested.

It’s that easy.

“Free classified ads (for items for sale for under $100) and super saver ads will also be available through this system as well as employment packages that include their ads on our new Monster partnership Web site — oongawah.monster.com,” said Crow.

“This is a much easier way to place your ad order online.”

To place an ad through online entry, go to romenews-tribune.com and click on the Place an Ad link in the Classifieds box on the upper right side of the page or click here.

Web Traffic Lingo

In the world of Web traffic, numbers get tossed around in a variety of ways and it’s useful for advertisers and consumers to know some of the terms.

Page views: Each time a Web page on a site is accessed by a visitor, it counts as one page view.

Unique visitors: A unique visitor is one visitor coming to a site or a page during a defined period of time. A reader may visit a site numerous times every day for an entire month, but only gets counted once. The best indicators on uniques are done monthly, quarterly or yearly. Reporting daily unique visitors can be misleading because a site may well have 800 unique visitors a day but only get 1,000 for the whole month.

Hits: Hits can be the most misleading statistic cited by Web sites hoping to inflate numbers. A hit is calculated every time a piece of content on a Web page loads. For example, the Rome News-Tribune Web site has more than 125 different pieces of content. So each time the home page loads, it counts as 125-plus hits. For example, our video hosting page averages somewhere around 42 million hits per month. Something to note: The online advertising industry stopped using hits as a viable source of data in 2002. Page views and long-term unique visitors are the true industry measures.

Server-side statistics: These are stats gathered by the hosting site of a Web site. These stats are not considered accurate and online advertising agencies decline to use data from these sources. Industry approved analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture and Nielsen Net ratings give more accurate indications of Web site traffic, time on site, unique visitors, page views and true metrics. Advertisers wanting to put ads online should ask for the confirmed Google Analytics data. If they don’t get it, they’re at risk of being misled.

By the Numbers

Page views on romenews-tribune.com have grown to an average of more than 1.3 million a month. Total for all NPCo Web site averages more than 2.3 million a month.

 

In the last two years, monthly unique visitors to romenews-tribune.com has grown from 35,000 to 93,000 in October 2008. NPCo sites have also grown from well under 100,000 total unique visitors to more 207,000 per month.

   

In December 2006, romenews-tribune.com was at 2 minutes for average “time on site” whereas in October 2008 it boasted a 5:55 average. 

Gridiron Central is the No. 2 Web site (after romenews-tribune.com) in the company and has drawn in more than 56,000 unique visitors since its relaunch in August and more than 600,000 page views with an average time on site of 5:45.

 

The NPCo multimedia team has shot and produced more than 2,000 local videos in the past two years.

NPCo online local videos have drawn more than 1.4 million unique views. In October, the company’s video server saw more than 1.75 terabytes of traffic. In the bandwidth world, a terabyte is equal to 1,000 gigabytes.