This is another story of David defeating Goliath, except that David won the fight without even knowing it. At the recent Online Journalism Awards banquet in Hollywood, the finalists for General Excellence (Small Sites) included the Center for Public Integrity, Congressional Quarterly's CQ.com, PBS' Frontline World, PBS' POV, and the VenturaCountyStar.com.
While the latter site is indeed owned by the E.W. Scripps Co. newspaper chain, it certainly didn't have the national cachet or reputation of its prominent opponents for the award. So when the announcement came -- "And the winner is ... VenturaCountyStar.com!" -- there was a pregnant pause as heads turned in search of the winner. It turns out the honcho of the site, 42-year-old Howard Owens, skipped the awards dinner, not expecting to win.
"I was really surprised frankly to get the award," Owens told me. "It was pretty stiff competition. I think all the other sites up for the award have bigger staffs and bigger budgets. I was tickled that we made the finals but didn't expect to win. It would have been worth the $500 [to attend] if I had known we were going to win."
So what gives? How did this site win the approval of the ONA judges over some tough competition? Thinking locally. VenturaCountyStar.com was one of the few finalists that really focused on local and community journalism down to the township level.
The ONA judges, in their official statement, probably put it best: "It's both a news site and an online home for the local community. They understand the area they serve, providing strong daily news coverage, live updates of high school sports, community photos, staff blogs, Webcams, and interactivity with clear design and navigation. They do something other local sites should do -- providing links right on the home page to coverage of specific towns in their coverage area."
In other words, this site has an obligation to cover all of Ventura County, a scenic area with mountains, forests, towns and beaches northwest of Los Angeles. Rather than thinking globally -- whether that means the world, U.S., California or even Ventura County-wide -- the site drills down to the community level from its home page. That has helped it hit profitability thanks to online classifieds; additionally, it had 243,000 unique visitors this past September, according to the Star (registration required).
While VenturaCountyStar.com has a nice collection of interactive treats, such as a beach Webcam and even a community photo moblog, its hidden strength is in local video. As Owens told me, there is no local TV affiliate in Ventura, leaving his site wide open to provide video of events such as high school football games.
In fact, video will only get more plentiful on VenturaCountyStar.com, according to Owens. He said plans were in the works to get basic videocameras into the hands of reporters so they can include video snippets of key interviews as they meet with sources.
The only downside to Owens' success with the site has been that he hasn't had time to keep up his personal Weblog, an interesting, moderately conservative take on politics and news. While Owens believes in the blogs at VenturaCountyStar.com -- and has plans to add a blogger who is a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan -- he has a different opinion now of his own blog. He took down the archives at HowardOwens.com and only has a note, where he endorses George W. Bush for president -- with reservations.
"Bloggers were becoming more entrenched in their partisan gutters and those endless arguments lost their appeal," Owens wrote. "Also, at the time, I had extreme doubts about my support of the war and frankly didn't want to advertise any longer some of my past rants, raves and lunacy. So I took the site down. I had other priorities."
I spoke to Owens a couple days after he won the ONA award, and the following is an edited transcript of our wide-ranging telephone conversation.
Online Journalism Review: Tell me about your background leading up to your work with the Star.
Howard Owens: A friend and I bought a small community weekly down in San Diego, in Ocean Beach, back in '86 - '87. After that I went to a community weekly in Carlsbad. After a couple years working in politics, I started doing pretty well in freelance writing. I did a story in early '95 about the World Wide Web and what San Diego publications were doing online for the San Diego Business Journal.
I got talking to Ron James, who's now with SignOnSanDiego, and he was working at San Diego Magazine at the time. He gave me free server space to create a community weekly for East San Diego County, and we created East County Online for absolutely no money.
At the time there were only two other community weeklies on the Web. After not making money at that, I decided to take a job up here in Ventura County with Affinity Group, eventually becoming a content producer at VenturaCountyStar.com in 1999. And I worked my way up to now being Director of New Media.
OJR: What did you do in politics?
HO: I was legislative aide to a state assemblyman, Tom Connelly. It was pretty much a nightmare. Tom was great, but the people I worked with were big-time jerks. [laughs] I was going to use Dick Cheney's word, but decided to censor myself. That experience cured me of going into politics.
OJR: How did your work in the early days of the Web help you in Ventura?
HO: A lot of my thinking about the Web hasn't really changed from those early days. At the time, every daily newspaper that started a Web site thought they were going to have national news and serve a national audience. I was thinking, right now everyone's hyped up about the Web and going online and discovering this whole world that is open to them. But at some point that's going to have less interest, and it's all going to come back to what's happening in the local community. And we want to focus on our local community.
At the time there weren't words like 'virtual community' or 'portal,' or I hadn't heard that at that time. But I was trying to create a portal [at East County Online]. We had a complete directory to every link related to East County. We were doing, with the limited software we had, some forums. We created the East County Online Club, where people could sign up online for community events. My primary focus at the Star is still local news. 'Portal' is kind of an out-of-fashion word, but it's a good catch-all to give an idea for what a site like ours should be trying to do.
OJR: Why do you think a lot of the smaller papers haven't had that local focus? Are you seeing them start to change?
HO: I'm hearing more and more sites talk about local news. I think there are some sites that are doing it naturally but are not making a big deal about it. When I first became director [last March] I didn't make a big deal out of it, because I wanted to, for a lot of internal reasons, turn the ship around. I said, 'We're really going to focus on local news right here.' I think that has been very successful for us. Our traffic has gone up every month since March. We're up about a million page views per month since then.
OJR: You think local news stories are driving that?
HO: Local news stories and updating the site frequently throughout the day. Also, doing more multimedia. We have two people working on multimedia now. We look for stories, as far as video goes, that have a feature quality. We did one with a local writer who's a comic writer. He did a piece where he went out to a park with a bunch of dogs, and he had the latest gadgets and toys related to canines. And he did demos with these dogs, dressed them up in bikinis, things like that.
To mention dogs again, one of our more popular videos was about a dog that was lost at sea and found. If there's a traffic accident, [we don't] send a camera out there. It's usually for feature stories. And for more serious stories as well. We recently did some stuff on religion and politics. Because [it takes time to produce], you want to get a good return on it.
OJR: Can you talk about your revenues and whether your site is profitable?
HO: We're definitely profitable. It's largely driven by employment and other classified categories. We're not very strong in autos or real estate, but we're working on that. For banner ads, we recently hired a new sales manager, and she's just getting up to speed. Our banner inventory is rather light right now.
OJR: What percentage of your revenues comes from classifieds?
HO: It's 90 percent right now. It's really out of whack.
OJR: Who are your competitors for that classified revenue?
HO: Your standard type of competitors for that stuff, Monster and eBay. Locally, there really isn't any. A little bit, the L.A. Times or Daily News but not a lot. We're in a unique position as a media company here. There's no TV station exclusively for Ventura County. There's some good radio stations, but radio is what it is. So we're really the big media company and we haven't really faced competition from any online upstarts.
Being an overall strong presence and having a quality Web site helps. I'm not necessarily going to give anybody clues, but we do have some weaknesses. There's one site I can mention. Ventura County has a very strong golf community, there are lots of golf courses here. Ever since I got here I've wanted to do a virtual community for golfers. Then the site TeeTime.com came along, and they're doing exactly that.
We made good friends with them, and we're going to revamp our golf site and focus on doing a Chamber of Commerce promotion of golf for the local area and let them do the community stuff. We just worked with them on a tournament of champions for local golfers. So far it's been a good partnership.
OJR: What do you think about the efforts of Yahoo Local and Google Local?
HO: You always have to worry about it. Is it hurting us at this point? I can't say that it is. We just have so much more content than they have. I think that a Yahoo or MSN is much more of a threat for the L.A. Times than it is for us at this point, because we're so localized and we're not in a market trafficked enough for Yahoo to put in resources for it.
OJR: How many staffers do you have working just for the site?
HO: We have seven, five are exclusively content, and we have a tech guy and a salesperson. And me. We need more advertising support, support for sales and for the sales staff. We have a great content staff, and the cooperation with the [print] newsroom is outstanding. We get other sites that call us and say, 'How do you get such great cooperation with your newsroom?' Really that's just our culture. Joe Howry, the Star editor, is just 100 percent behind online, and it's just an expectation that the newsroom will work with us.
We're kitty-corner to the newsroom. Our online editor sits very close to the county desk. Joe Howry recently appointed John Moore as assistant managing editor of new media. I included him in my count, but he doesn't report to me. His job is to make sure we get as much news as possible online as quickly as possible, and to make sure we're not missing any stories that should be enhanced for the Web.
OJR: How important is getting readers involved, like your photo moblog? Are you looking to add more of these?
HO: I'm a big believer in participatory journalism, or user-generated content. I think it's very important. We have other things we're focused on right now, but setting that moblog up with Text America was so easy, I wanted to go ahead and do it. I wanted to get our toe in the water in a way that's not hugely expensive for us and start the ball rolling, get our users accustomed to sharing content.
OJR: Do you filter it in some way?
HO: Everything is reviewed before it goes live on the site for the moblog. We hardly monitor the forums, and that hasn't been a problem. Participatory journalism is one of those things that's on the radar, and important, but it's not a priority.
OJR: What about the Weblogs that you have?
HO: We're adding more, we're soliciting more from people in the community. We have a couple good candidates. We have one that will be online in a week or two from a local helicopter pilot who's in Afghanistan. We have a few others that are promising. We have a local dietician who I think will be fantastic.
OJR: Do you pay for them or are they volunteer?
HO: Primarily volunteer.
OJR: How do you motivate them?
HO: We're going to find out. It's all an experiment. We haven't had a lot of success getting people from the newspaper to blog. Journalists are extremely busy people, and their editors don't want them blogging in lieu of producing copy for the paper. You do get into all kinds of issues when you have a reporter doing a blog. You can't do a good blog without injecting opinion or snarkiness or something. And you really shouldn't have your reporters doing that. I know some papers are doing that and doing it with success, but we've always had some nervousness about that.
OJR: You had a Weblog for awhile, and you decided to close yours down?
HO: When I got promoted, I felt like I really needed to concentrate on my job and not get distracted by the blog. Now that I've settled into my new job, I kind of miss it. But frankly, I can make more money playing online poker.
OJR: This was a decision you made and not your bosses at Scripps?
HO: Right. In fact, Bob Benz, the general manager of interactive media for Scripps, was disappointed that I shut it down. And I was one of the few people in new media that was blogging. He expressly told me I didn't have to shut it down. I wanted to do the job right and didn't want the distraction. It was a time issue and the mental energy. I wasn't getting that much out of it. There are much better bloggers out there doing general interest and politics. Ken Layne and Matt Welch are friends of mine and are much better.
OJR: What do you think about the people in the blogosphere that say the political views at newspapers should be very transparent? Slate came out and said who their staff supported for U.S. president. What do you think about that?
HO: When you talk about Big Media, you talk about East Coast elite media. At our newspaper, covering local news, we have a great staff and whatever political background or issues are there has far less of an impact on editorial decisions at a local paper than it does at The New York Times and Washington Post. Setting that aside, and talking about The New York Times, ABC, CBS, I don't trust those people. I go along with a lot of the bloggers' mistrust of the major media, and I have felt that way since I was a cub reporter at the Daily Californian in San Diego.
I think that you get into that beltway and buy into that culture, and one of my pet peeves is anonymous-sourced stories. There's far too much of that, and I think that's really horrible, horrible journalism. And it's a real disservice to our country, some of the things that come out with a single anonymous source, making the kind of wild allegations about anyone, whether it's the Democrats or the Bush Administration. But should there be a liberal Fox News? I think CBS News is already that.
OJR: What about locally? You cover a lot of local politics. What if someone who writes for you gives to a campaign?
HO: That should never happen. You have to stay out of the local politics. It's a totally different dynamic. Most of the issues you deal with on a local basis don't have the same partisan adhesiveness. Let's say you are a reporter covering City Council and you have Democratic leanings, and probably a lot of people assume reporters have. Well, 99 percent of the issues you're covering don't have a Democratic or Republican adhesion to them. That's not something the public needs to be concerned about.
The big danger for any reporter, and I've certainly felt this, is you see these people all the time. You learn about their kids and their hobbies, and they learn about you, and you sit around over coffee talking about issues other than the news. And you become friends with these people and it's very hard sometimes to set that aside. You're friends with the mayor and he screwed up and you have to report that honestly. But that has nothing to do with being Republican or Democrat. We're all human and want to be liked.
OJR: What features would you like to add along with the blogs?
HO: The first priority is to get more local news up on the site. Each day, we get about four or five stories up during the day, but some days it's just one or two. I want to get four, five or six every single weekday. We want to get more video up more often. We're always working on doing better quality video. Right now we're just doing video as an entire package, but we might do more video where it's not a whole production.
OJR: Have you considered having print photographers take videocameras with them?
HO: We've had discussions with them, but don't quite have the tools yet. I see that happening eventually. There are also some really inexpensive Webcams you can get for less than $100 now. I have one on order and want to see how that does. I think it would be great for any reporter who wants to take that out on an interview. Just go out, do your interview, know what part of the interview sums up what your story is about, get out the camera, and have them answer the question again. Get 30 or 60 seconds of video, and we don't have to do any editing. That's something I hope to be doing by early next year.
OJR: So you missed the ONA awards show down the highway in Hollywood? What happened?
HO: Well, I couldn't bite the $500 bullet to go. I was really surprised frankly to get the award. It was pretty stiff competition. I think all the other sites up for the award have bigger staffs and bigger budgets. I was tickled that we made the finals but didn't expect to win. It would have been worth the $500 if I had known we were going to win.
