A fully integrated media strategy

Suzi Parker

   In February 1998, when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh admitted to his attorneys that he had bombed the federal building, the story didn't break on the front page of the New York Times or even nationally on the nightly network news, though all the national press had been following the story intently. It broke on the web site of the Dallas Morning News.
   It was a major scoop for the News but for its parent, A.H. Belo Corp., the event held far greater symbolic value. In an age when so many American newspapers had acclimated themselves to decline and incursion, Belo was working hard to create a strategy integrating all its media holdings, from newspapers to TV and cable to the web.
   Now the world was noticing. In November 1997, the Dallas Morning News web site logged 2,000 daily user sessions. When the McVeigh story broke, the site had roughly 25,000 hits. Now more than 100,000 users hit the site daily with 10 million page views a day. Visitors come from 42 states and 31 countries.
   "Certainly the ability to distribute news on the internet extends beyond the range of a delivery truck," says Dale Peskin, vice president of Belo's interactive media publishing division. "The largest audience is in Texas," says Peskin. "We have more users beyond the Dallas/Ft. Worth area than we have in the market itself. That's certainly good news for the newspaper and the internet site."
   To be sure. Belo has put its strategy to work to create a major regional presence as the most powerful media company in the Southwest. The News itself has risen to become one of the nation's top ten papers, with the eighth-largest Sunday circulation and ninth-largest daily circulation. As other regional papers retreat, the news extends it presence over more and more states. It's often the first paper locals look to in cities as far away as Little Rock, Arkansas. They turn to it not just for its superior news coverage but for the ads of the major regional retail chains.
   Belo has also cemented its position in Dallas. Though dismissed in the Seventies as sleepy by even Southern newspaper company standards, Belo withstood a serious challenge when Los Angeles Times' parent Times-Mirror bought the evening Dallas Times Herald as part of a push to become a national newspaper chain. Times-Mirror flopped badly and sold the paper a few years later. Belo got toughened.
   Now Belo is developing its web presence to further strengthen its presence in its home market.
   Last fall, Belo launched Guidelive.com, an online guide to restaurants and events in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Guideline offers 180,000 records with listings of 300 to 400 new events each week. "It's a lifestyle product," says Peskin. "We are beginning to partner with a number of different kinds of groups and advertisers aimed at various demographic groups."
   Then in February it joined an alliance of Texas newspapers to create a statewide online classified network. The TEXAS4U.COM web site will link visitors to the classified web pages of the member newspapers. Visitors will be able to place both online and print classified by email.
   The network broadens the Belo franchise while effectively fending off upstart online classified services that have been raiding the high-profit classified sales of newspapers in major markets such as Chicago. Classifieds can represent up to 40 percent of a newspaper's margins.
   "Belo will neither be simply a newspaper company or a broadcast company but a knowledge or information company," says Peskin. "That's what we do best. We distribute it in the best forms possible. That is who we are and what we do."