Despite its woes with an advanced content management system and headaches with a failed advertising partnership, Grosse Pointe Today continues on track for its second year. In addition to receiving 501(c)3 status from the IRS, the site has also signed an experimental agreement to share content with Yahoo.
GrossePointeToday.com launched with a beta version in early 2009, in the hopes of getting the entire site live within 60 to 90 days. That did not happen on schedule because Drupal, the more sophisticated software they used, came with a steep learning curve for their software designer. After hiring an assistant for the designer and a “so-called Drupal expert” as a consultant, much of the site’s first year funding went to development, monthly maintenance and server space rental.
“I would recommend that other start-ups seriously consider using WordPress,” said publisher Ben Burns, of the free blogging platform. “At the same time our site has been repeatedly praised for its design, ease of use and effectiveness so you have to weigh the two factors against each other.”
The site has been humming along since, adding an archive feature in December and gradually building an audience in the process.
Citing a slow month in April due to spring breaks at local schools and Wayne State, Burns reported 6,319 unique visitors that month, with 26,650 page views and an average of 4.22 pages per visit.
However, the biggest single headache for Burns in running the site is advertising. “We thought we had the perfect arrangement with a 40-year-old Bluebook directory of the area that lacked a decent website. We would promote and link to their directory and their staff of six would sell ads.”
The company told Burns they could not find an individual to sell exclusively for his site. Once Burns found his own salesperson to work based on commission, the former auto supply salesman sold few ads and quit citing the difficulty of working with sales people from the company that “kept claiming dibs on the most logical local advertisers.” Promising a big push in the first part of the year, the sales team sold a few ads in January, none in February and one in March. Grosse Point Today is reevaluating its advertising strategy.
The Yahoo arrangement will not net Grosse Pointe Today any income, but it may generate traffic from new users.
Among the best ideas from his team this year, Burns points to the public safety map they created using Google Maps. Another top feature remains the changing image on the home page, which gets refreshed four to five times a week, and users are submitting their own pictures. And videos uploaded from two local high school sports competitions within 24 hours after the event have also proven popular.
Setbacks, in addition to the operating system and the advertising arrangement, include the longer than expected time it took to set up an archive system and inadequate hosting on a borrowed server. While the site each semester averages six students from Wayne State, where Burns directs the journalism program, other schools have not delivered as much content as expected.
As their second year of funding gets under way, the site will have $25,000 in the bank, but Burns says they need to address revenue. “We simply can’t afford to reward the folks that are putting in the hours to make the site,” he reports. He is exploring offering local governments the chance to put content into dedicated sections of the site, since they are cash-strapped themselves and may not be able to continue operating their own websites.
Other than the Yahoo deal, their plans for Year Two have not changed in scope. They plan to pay up to $150 for in-depth, assigned stories and will start compensating student reporters to help cover fuel costs. In addition, they will spend $1,000 to $2,000 on marketing and promotion of the site. And hopefully later in 2011, the site will be able to compensate managing editor Nancy Nall Derringer and associate publisher Sheila Tomkowiak.
While no one wants to see other journalists fail, Burns has witnessed other former daily journalists in the market to launch sites of their own before giving up because, as he put it, “they couldn’t compete with us in terms of ‘feet on the ground.’ “
