Studio city: Cox Interactive Media in Florida provides a variety of web sites, ranging from traditional news and entertainment, to classifieds, to a site that specializes in storm watching.

Cox developing 'Net business
a world apart from newspapers

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- To David Easterly, president of Cox Enterprises Inc. of Atlanta, the Internet is not just a place to establish adjuncts to the company's newspapers and broadcasting properties. He looks on the Internet as a whole new business -- just as James Cox, the company's founder, viewed his early forays from publishing into radio in the 1930s and television in the 1940s.

So, unlike many newspaper publishers, Cox has set up a separate entity, Cox Interactive Media (CIM), to deal with the world of the Internet and develop web sites. The managers of the sites work closely with the editors and publishers of Cox newspapers, but the 'Net operation is completely independent from newsrooms, as it is from the cable or broadcast operations Cox runs.

Thus far, the system seems to be working. CIM is less than two years old, and its first web site -- in Atlanta -- has been operating only a little more than a year. Three other sites working with Cox newspapers -- here in Palm Beach, plus Dayton, Ohio, and Austin, Texas -- are up and running. Cox also has established several other sites where it has radio, TV and cable operations.

Cox plans web sites in every place where it has a media property. A $3 billion enterprise with a third of its revenue coming from newspapers, Cox is the ninth largest U.S. media company, reaching markets with more than 60 million people. Its holdings include 19 daily papers, six television stations and 38 radio stations. It is also the nation's fifth largest cable operator.

"Our various activities associated with the Internet represent very real pioneering on our part," Easterly said. "Cox Interactive Media recognizes the probable growth of the Internet and has put a stake in the ground in most of our media markets. Our aim is to be a major player in the business of local information and entertainment on the Internet. In fact, Cox Interactive Media became the country's leading supplier of such information in its first year in business."

In addition to its web sites in cities where it has newspapers or TV operations, Cox also has established a Florida site called Storm98 to track hurricanes and tornadoes (http://www.storm98.com/), a site called Fastball that's crammed with baseball information (http://www.fastball.com/), a site about the great outdoors (http://www.greatoutdoors.com/), a sports site concerning itself with the Big 12 college conference (http://www.gobig12.com/) and Y'all, which CIM calls the home page for the South (http://www.yall.com/).

"While we are not in the business of inventing technology," Easterly said, "we have a long and successful history of being an early adopter and building commercial success from the foundation of new technologies."

Cox was an early newspaper owner of a radio station, establishing Whio in Dayton in 1934, where the Cox empire began with the Dayton Daily News. In 1948, it launched the South's first TV station, WSB-TV in Atlanta, where Cox had acquired the Atlanta Journal a decade earlier.

"We are moving and growing at a blistering pace," said CIM President Peter Winter. "Cox Enterprises has invested heavily in 25 media markets around the country to build No. 1-ranked newspapers, TV and radio stations and cable systems. Our job is to protect and grow that franchise by creating a network of local web sites that the 60 million consumers in Cox markets return to again and again."

And how do Cox editors and publishers like the system that divorces them from web site decisions and operations?

No complaints, said Arnold Rosenfeld, senior vice president and editor-in-chief of Cox Newspapers.

"We get along just fine," said Ron Martin, editor of the Journal and Constitution in Atlanta, the largest Cox newspapers with a combined circulation of 466,000.

"I like the arrangement," added Tom O'Hara, managing editor of the Palm Beach Post (circulation 160,000). "I wouldn't want to supervise the on-line operation. I've got enough to do just worrying about putting out our newspaper."

How it works in Palm Beach
No two Cox sites are exactly the same, but the one here in Palm Beach is fairly typical of what the company is rolling out across the country.

In addition to drawing on the output of the Post, the web site uses material from Cox's tiny Palm Beach Daily News, most of whose 6135 subscribers live on tony Palm Beach itself, and the Florida Pennysaver, a Cox shopper with a circulation of 345,000. Video and audio are obtained from local TV station Wpec, which is owned by Freedom Communications Inc. of Irvine, Calif.

With the title of city site development manager, Dan Shorter supervises the Palm Beach operation. He has a staff of 16, six of whom are producers feeding the web site 24 hours a day. The others make up the advertising sales staff.

Like most of those involved in producing web sites where Cox publishes newspapers, the 42-year-old Shorter comes to his job with a print background. He was a business editor and assistant managing editor at the Post before moving to the web site.

In addition to overseeing the West Palm Beach site, GoPBI (http://www.gopbi.com/), Shorter is in charge of the Palm Beach classified site (http://the.palmbeachclassifieds.com/); SoFla (http://www.sofla.com/), a site in Miami (where Cox has radio stations Wflc and Whqt), and the aforementioned Storm98, which provides radar weather updates every 20 seconds and has watchers worldwide.

GoPBI covers Palm Beach County and Martin and St. Lucie counties to the north, which are also part of the Post's circulation area. It is a market with a population of 1.4 million, of whom, Shorter said, 340,000 have access to computers. Dade County, where Miami is located, has a population of more than two million.

Shorter will not disclose how many hits his sites get, but says that traffic is increasing nicely. The sites have been in operation since summer.

Cox calls the offices for its sites "studios" -- "I guess it's because they're considered creative places," Shorter said. (Cox announced April 29 it had opened another Internet studio, in Providence, R.I., where it has a cable system.)

The studio here is in the same modern building that houses the paper, but the only traffic between it and the newsroom occurs when Shorter or one of his staff goes to the Post editors' meeting at which the day's stories are discussed.

The web staffer not only listens to the editors but also talks about what is being planned for the site independently of the paper's coverage. For example, on the day country singer Tammy Wynette died in April, GoPBI quickly prepared a package including video and audio as well as the Post's story.

GoPBI boasts that it is an interactive community linking residents from 56 municipalities, featuring the latest headlines and "the most comprehensive weather coverage around." It also says "photo, audio and video clips bring the news 'to life' and viewers are encouraged to share their comments and views with editors on-line."

The web site relies on The Wire from the Associated Press for its headlines, puts up local and regional news from the newspapers and is heavy with sports, which is by far its most popular offering.

Knowledge of market
"I'm surprised at the breadth of our users," Shorter said. "There are almost as many women as men, and we're not just appealing to a certain age group -- we've got people of all ages."

CIM President Winter said, "We use the knowledge we've developed over 100 years of serving our media markets to evolve sites that have real utility and high entertainment value. When you visit our sites, you will not see a cookie-cutter format repeated in each market. Our sites reflect the unique characteristics of the cities they serve."

This is certainly true in Florida. Shorter pointed out that the SoFla site in Miami is oriented more toward entertainment, reflecting its market, than is the Palm Beach operation. But entertainment is important there too, where information about restaurants has just been added to the GoPBI mix. Also put on the site recently are guides to lawyers, doctors and other medical professionals.

And how's advertising doing? Shorter reported that Bell South is an important advertiser. Strictly local advertising comes mainly from auto dealers, real estate companies and -- not surprisingly for a retirement state like Florida -- health care providers.

The classified site charges 50 cents a day for each ad it picks up from the Cox papers. It's up to the advertiser to decide whether to go on-line, but Shorter said volume continues to increase.

Advertising is in fact perhaps the principal driver of the Cox decision to keep its Internet operations separate from its newspaper, broadcasting and cable properties. Said Marleen Burford, manager of marketing services for CIM: "Sales staffs really can't sell more than one product satisfactorily. You don't want a sales person to say, 'Go to the newspaper, don't go to the Internet,' or vice versa. You want your sales people really dedicated to one medium."

Shorter said he has heard of situations at newspapers -- not any owned by Cox, he hastened to add -- where advertising representatives have been told not to solicit business for the Internet from certain companies because "we want to save them for the paper."

Divorced from newspapers as they may be, the Cox studios have picked up many print tricks to lure viewers. Easter eggs were hidden on GoPBI. "Romantic" dinners at restaurants were given away to mark Valentine's Day. T-shirts have become a staple. Minor league baseball tickets are given out. And GoPBI also has plans to give away an automobile as part of a promotional campaign.

Shorter said he and his GoPBI colleagues get along just fine with the editors, publishers and general managers at the Cox papers in Florida.

"Sometimes, in fact," he added, "we're told that we treated a story better than the newspaper did."

CIM's goals
Each CIM site designs its own production system to meet its particular needs. The studio managers talk during conference calls at least once a week to exchange ideas and discuss problems that may have cropped up.

"CIM has two goals," Burford noted. "First, to build long-term brands and audiences on the Internet which serve local residents and advertisers. Leveraging the Internet's ability to provide instant information is CIM's foundation for both its advertisers and products.

"Second, to build informative and entertaining web sites which encourage interaction by catering to the passions and interests of our users. Creating products that are immediate, dynamic, thought-provoking and innovative is the hallmark of CIM."

Shorter noted that the target audience for GoPBI is college-educated 25- to 54-year-old men and women who have incomes of at least $50,000.

The thinking behind the Cox decision to spin off its Internet operations into a subsidiary independent from its newspaper and broadcasting properties seems to make sense. Its newspaper editors are freed up from worrying about both daily newspaper deadlines and minute-by-minute web site operations. And advertising sales personnel certainly do best when they can concentrate on one medium.

But it is still too early to tell whether the Cox approach will propel it ahead of other newspapers. Everyone is still struggling to understand the Internet and its users.

And advertisers are still wondering what sort of market the Internet provides them. As CIM's Burford and GoPBI's Shorter both note, when you are dealing with the Internet, change is a constant.

So far, the content of the web sites is not too different from what other newspaper are doing, with the emphasis on local news and sports in addition to large dollops of lists and entertainment. And the advertisers CIM has enticed to its web sites are also not too different from those going on-line at other newspaper sites.

So, as founder James Cox may have said when he set up his radio station in the 1930s -- stay tuned.

-- Julius Duscha

Cox Interactive Media,
(404) 572-1830,
e-mail: comments@cimedia.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.