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Happy Valley and Beyond:
Establishing Local Identity for Online News
by Bob Stepno
Department of Journalism and Public Information
Emerson College
bob_stepno@emerson.edu
3,371 words
posted: december 19, 1999
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[This is the text of a paper presented at the Media in Transition Conference at MIT on October 8, 1999.]
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WRAL OnLine (http://wral-tv.com) received
national recognition in its first year of operation as one of the first
24-hour-a-day news sites launched by a television station, and has continued
to refine its contents and appearance each year. This paper, part of a
larger work in progress, presents a brief history of WRAL OnLine and its
parent company, including a design-history of the Web site's home page.
Based on observation of the site and interviews with the its news producers,
designers and programmers, the larger project draws on two streams in the
mass communication literature: "gatekeeping" research and sociological
studies of newsworkers. No case is made for WRAL being typical or representative
of American television stations' explorations of the Internet; instead
it is presented here as a case that shows media professionals actively
exploring the possibilities of a new medium where features of print newspapers,
broadcast news, and the interactive features of a new medium.
During the site's first three and a half years,
the staff refined the home page as a presentation of information about
both the day's news events and the site's full range of contents, including
interactive features, online video, and reference links mentioned during
television news broadcasts. The evolving features of WRAL OnLine suggest
a blurring of technological and media-content boundaries, illustrating
phenomena discussed recently by J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin under
the title Remediation, as well as the changes Roger Fidler suggests
in his book, Mediamorphosis. With its parent company's interests
in digital broadcasting and data communications, WRAL OnLine seems worth
watching.
Each year since its launch, WRAL-OnLine has made
incremental changes in form and content, as well as making alliances with
other media organizations. The first incarnation of the home page was a
cartoon of a smiling sun shining on a hillside of iconic buildings representing
different parts of the site; the "Happy Valley" of my title. This paper
suggests that the changes not only responded to the evolving technological
capabilities of Web browsers, but have clarified the site's purpose and
identity -- in relation to the station's parent company, its other media
properties, and the local community. The designs and redesigns also illustrate
the blurring boundaries between news, entertainment, public service, commercial
and self-promotional functions of the media. Among WRAL OnLine's features
are a 24-hour-a-day approach to national and international news, a complete
archive of feature story Web pages based on original WRAL-TV reporting
since the site's inception; integration of digital text, video, audio and
databases in local reporting; early steps in online commerce, and attempts
to encourage audience identification (or "virtual-community-building")
through bulletin boards, polls, and other interactive features.
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WRAL: Corporate Context
WRAL-TV is owned by Capitol Broadcasting Company,
Inc., a diversified communications company that began with a single Raleigh,
N.C., radio station in 1937. By 1998 Capitol Broadcasting included three
television channels and a wide range of other services, and had a reputation
as a technological innovator or "early adopter" through its entries into
FM radio, television, digital high definition television (HDTV), and the
Internet. Capitol Broadcasting's founders were Alfred J. Fletcher, a Raleigh
attorney, and his son Frank, an attorney with the Federal Communications
Commission. Their 250-watt WRAL-AM went on the air in 1939 as the second
commercial station in the city. Fred Fletcher, another son of A.J. Fletcher,
became general manager in 1942 and continued as the company's president
into the 1970s. Jim Goodmon, a grandson of the founder, was company president
and CEO in the 1990s.
Several milestones listed in the company history
involve the company's adoption of new communication technologies: starting
FM broadcasts in 1946, launching its television operation in 1956, building
its 2,000-foot transmitting tower in 1978 (the "tallest man-made structure
east of the Mississippi River"), and hiring professional meteorologists
for the newsroom staff in 1982 as the WRAL-TV Weather Center. With the
launch of WRAL OnLine in January 1996, the company added the Internet to
its media-technology résumé. (WRAL, 1998)
An article by Goodmon, posted on the company Web
site, summarizes the WRAL's image as a technological leader:
Channel 5 quickly became a national leader in innovative news
and community-oriented programming. Today, Channel 5 CBS continues to lead
the nation in its innovative approach to communicating with its publics
with the addition of WRAL OnLine, a comprehensive release of up-to-the-minute
news, weather, and sports reports on the Internet and World Wide Web. (Goodmon,
1996)
Goodmon is credited by the firm with its expansion
into satellite communications, the Internet, and HDTV. Television Broadcast
magazine named WRAL 1996 Broadcaster of the Year for being the first commercial
television station in the U.S. to broadcast a high-definition digital signal.
Capitol Broadcasting's other subsidiaries include Capitol Radio Networks,
the Durham Bulls baseball team, the Capitolnet Marketing Group, and Microspace
Communications Corporation, (satellite transmission of data, video and
audio). The company owned an Internet Service Provider (ISP) business,
Interpath, but sold it to the Carolina Light & Power Company in December,
1997, arguing that facilities-based telecommunications companies were better
suited to the ISP business, and citing a series of start-ups, mergers or
acquisitions by companies including GTE, AT&T, BellSouth and WorldCom/MCI
(Capitol Broadcasting, 1997). In addition to WRAL-TV, the CBS-affiliated
channel 5, Capitol Broadcasting operated several other television stations
in North Carolina, either as owner or under limited marketing agreements
(LMAs) with their owners: WRAZ Channel 50 in Durham (Fox), WJZY Channel
46 in Charlotte (UPN), WFVT Channel 55 in Charlotte (Warner Brothers),
and WRAL-HDTV, Channel 32. The parent company and other stations also established
Web sites, but without the 24-hour-a-day-news focus of WRAL OnLine. Until
1999, the WRAL OnLine home page included a link to WRAZ, but the June,
1999, redesign did not.
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WRAL OnLine
In January, 1996, WRAL began delivering news at
the Internet address http://www.wral-tv.com. It was the first Raleigh-Durham
television station on the Web, establishing its presence before its national
television network (CBS) went online. The Web site's own history page summarizes
its features as follows:
WRAL-TV5 OnLine features: highlights of WRAL's top news stories
updated regularly; weather forecasts updated several times a day; sports
scores and a "Play of the Day" video; a daily program schedule; "Buying
Power," "Health Team," "For The Children," and other special features;
shopping coupons and sponsor advertisements; information about WRAL-TV5,
its mission and its people; an updated list of community events and volunteer
opportunities; and, the opportunity to correspond with the staff of WRAL-TV5.
(WRAL, 1998.)
The original staff included a technical director
(computer systems administrator and programmer), John Whitehead, who was
hired a year before the launch of the Web site, while a graphic designer
and news producer were being recruited from the television station's staff.
WRAL OnLine's news director, John Conway, additional news producers and
a second programmer were hired from outside the company to prepare for
the launch in January, 1996. His primary experience was in daily newspaper
journalism. Other staff members' professional experience was a cross-section
of print newspaper reporting and editing, radio and television news and
technical writing. By the launch date the OnLine staff had created dozens
of Web pages using November and December WRAL-TV stories -- both as a "shake-down"
period for the production process and as the beginning of WRAL OnLine's
practice of maintaining searchable archives of its daily stories.
After those shakedown weeks, the television station
broadcast a five-day series of stories about the Web in February, including
the formal announcement of WRAL OnLine to its home audience. A story archived
at WRAL OnLine with the date Feb. 12, 1996, talks about the site's "first
24 hours of operation" being a success, suggesting the first "official"
day was Feb. 11. However, the organization marked its one-year anniversary
January 17, 1997. (Its online archives include stories from November and
December, 1995, which were developed in preparation for regular daily operation.)
During the time period of this study WRAL OnLine
was housed in two offices on the first and second floors of the main WRAL-TV
building in Raleigh, N.C. The upstairs office housed the Web server computers
and the work stations for the two programmers and the graphic designer.
The compact downstairs "newsroom" included four work stations, television
monitors, video and audio recording equipment, and computers linked to
both the station's internal computer system and the Internet. The four
desks accommodated the four full-time and two to four part-time producers,
who worked overlapping shifts. (Usually no more than three staff members
used the room at a time.) The news producer and feature producer sat back-to-back
at one end of the room; the sports producer and news director at the other.
WRAL OnLine followed television news terminology, using the title "producer"
rather than "editor."
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WRAL's television studios and broadcast newsroom,
with a staff of more than 75 reporters and producers, were also on the
first floor of the building, down a twisting corridor from the OnLine offices.
The two departments shared computer printers in the connecting hallway,
as well as sharing use of a conference room a few steps from the OnLine
newsroom entrance. Administratively, Conway reported to the station's promotions
director, and WRAL OnLine staff members sometimes contributed to projects
for other parts of the organization, such as graphic designs for use on-air
or in promotional publications.
The Web site's original file and database structures
were used by WRAL OnLine for at least three years, although the original
technical director who developed them left the company shortly after the
site's first full year of operation. Continuity was provided by Jason Priebe,
the organization's second programmer, who joined the company a few months
after the launch of the site and was promoted to technical director the
next year. Both Whitehead and Priebe developed programs to automate or
facilitate various kinds of text conversion and page-construction. An additional
programmer was hired in May 1997, but left after a little over a year.
The original visual design elements for the Web pages were created by WRAL-TV
staff designers in consultation with the television station's management.
The WRAL logo, weather maps and other graphics were patterned after those
presented to the station's television station. Categories for the news
presentation were modeled on the categories of station news and Associated
Press wire service news categories:
On the occasion of its first anniversary, WRAL OnLine
described itself as "one of the first TV stations with a real commitment
to providing 24-hour news and information," and summarized several "strengths
of television" that it intended to bring to the Web: "immediacy, personality,
local news, informational graphics, entertainment, community service, live
audio, and most recently, live video." In that first year, the station's
home page had been visited more than 1 million times, the staff had written
1,685 local news and sports stories and 942 local features, and the online
archives totalled 8,300 Web pages. (WRAL, 1997)
WRAL5 OnLine has presented a new or
mostly-new face to its viewers once a year, with some design changes between
these major "new looks." The original home page (1996-97) was a full-screen
cartoon of a landscape that the staff came to refer to as "Happy Valley."
A dozen objects located in the scene were "clickable" links to the main
sections of the WRAL Web site. A cartoon sun with a toothy smile rose in
the back of the scene, under an airplane towing a "Weather Center" banner.
A football stadium was labelled "Sports"; a van with a satellite antenna
on the roof was marked "News"; a television set's screen held the words
"What's On?" Other features were: a shopping mall for online shopping,
a drive-in theater ("Features"), a street sign marked "Interpath" (the
Capitol Broadcasting Internet access company), a statue marked "Town Square,"
a billboard labelled "Neat Stuff" and two antenna-topped buildings in the
background, marked WRAL and WRAZ (WRAL's sister station). For visitors
whose browsers were incapable of displaying graphical navigation maps,
the page included a text menu at the bottom- below the area of the screen
devoted to the Happy Valley map.
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1997 Design
The 1997 home page was reminiscent of contemporary
newspaper front-page designs, such as USA Today. That is, it divided
the screen (or page) into distinct rectangular areas beneath a nameplate
or title-bar area at the top. It presented a narrow menu at the left, stories
at the right, and one- or two-line text "teases" at the bottom. The blue
title bar had a "WRAL5 OnLine" logo in the center, with clickable links
on the words "contents," "search," "help" and "feedback" incorporated in
its bottom edge. On either side of the logo, the blue bar carried slogans,
"News and information 24 hours a day" and "Coverage you can count on."
(The latter being a slogan used in the broadcast station's own promotions.)
While this design (Figure 2) departed from the full-screen
graphical image, a smaller version of the earlier Happy Valley map now
appeared as a square (c. 1.5- inch) image near the top of the page. This
image was not only a reminder, but a clickable link to the original full-screen
version of the home page for users who were accustomed to that means of
navigating the site. On the new home page, the small Happy Valley image
topped a column on the left side of the screen, including a text-only menu
listing 10 major sections of the site (News, Weather, Sports, Features,
etc.), and three small rectangular graphics linked to special features.
(Example: "A new way to track the hurricanes!" promoting the "ncstormtrack.com"
site established and promoted jointly by WRAL's meteorology staff and and
the News & Observer.)
To the right of this menu, the main body of the
page (roughly three-fourths of its width) was divided into six display
spaces, including one for an advertising banner. There were three horizontal
display spaces atop three smaller vertical display spaces; the first and
third horizontal spaces each included a short section label ("Top Story,"
"Triangle and N.C."), a longer story headline in one or two lines, a photograph
(or other image, such as a sports team logo) and the first sentence or
two of the story. Clicking on the story headline transported the viewer
to the full text of that story. The space between the "Top Story" and the
second story was used for an advertisement. On a small computer screen,
only the top story and the advertisement would be visible without scrolling
the screen.
Lower on the screen, the three vertical spaces each
held a short section label ("Sports," "Health Team" or another section
of the site), an image, and the first sentence or two of a story. No headlines
were used, but the section labels were linked to the full text of the story.
The bottom of the page carried four one-sentence "teases" to contents of
the site other than routine news stories, such as feature sections), opinion
polls, or general promotion of various sections of the site. (Examples:
"New in Features: Lynn Hoggard's Recipes Remakes," "Attention baseball
fans: Check out our improved scores page.") News section pages followed
a similar design, with a similar title bar, menu on the left side of the
screen, and photos with story headlines and summaries, as well as an advertisement
between the first and second stories.
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1998 Design
The January 1998 redesign added reminders that WRAL
OnLine is the Web site of a television station. Photographs, whether WRAL-TV
images or wire photos from Reuters and AP, were reformatted from their
original rectangular shapes to look like television screens. (A program
was written to frame the images in a border shaped like a picture tube,
with rounded corners and a background shadow to add contour.) Instead of
1997's two-column layout, the 1998 design divided the screen vertically
into three columns underneath a combined title bar and navigational menu.
At first the three columns were only suggested by blank space, but later
in the year narrow dividing lines were added.
The new title bar appeared at the top of all section
pages, which meant that a visitor could use the title bar's navigation
menu to go to any of the major pages in the site without having to scroll
down the screen, which had been the case with the 1997 version's left-column
menu. There were few changes in content categories from the 1996 or 1997
versions of the site, primarily a change in navigation and aesthetics and
creation of more prominent spaces for both on-site promotions and off-site
advertising. Most section pages also used a three-column design somewhat
similar to the home page. The feature section continued to use a large
graphic to present its diverse sub-sections until late 1998, when it shifted
to a modified version of the three-column layout.
Features of the 1998 design were adjusted gradually
during the year, including revisions of the scrolling index menu and relocation
of a Java-driven headline ticker to a separate page. While the developers
were excited about Java, it slowed delivery of the page on some systems
enough to raise concern. They moved it to a separate version of the home
page, which users with more robust systems can bookmark.
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1999 Design
The main redesign for 1999 was completed in the
spring, replacing the blue title bars throughout the site with a silver
version that added five items to the main menu, which now had three full
rows of links. The new items provided separate home page links to each
of the "feature" areas of the site, which previously had required the user
to navigate through one or two intermediary pages to reach topics that
represent major segments of the television station's daily newscasts: health,
consumer, food, family and leisure features. These feature stories had
represented major efforts on the part of both the WRAL OnLine staff and
the television reporters since the start of the site. They included pages
the online designer and producers considered to be some of their most creative
work, as well as sections mirroring television segments with a loyal following.
In addition, the main "local news" section of the site was promoted to
the top left position on the home page menu, giving additional emphasis
to Web pages featuring stories developed by WRAL-TV's own reporters and
producers, rather than syndicated or wire-service material.
The top-right position on the new main menu was
now "WebLinks," the hyperlink to a page featuring clickable links to sites
mentioned during one or more of WRAL-TV's daily newscasts. The presence
of this link was mentioned frequently by the television announcers as a
source of examples or additional information. The "WRALMart" electronic-commerce
link had occupied this position on the menu in the previous design, but
the 1999 home page reflected the site's commercial enterprises in other
ways: A new link name, "iShop," as well as tease links to particular commercial
and station-promotion sections of the site. Above the tease links, the
page's right column featured a daily "hot button" poll that was mentioned
on many of the broadcast news programs. In addition to the poll, the right
column teases highlighted in-depth coverage, such as features on the moving
of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, the U.S. Open and, later in the year,
Hurricane Floyd and hurricane flood relief efforts. WRAL OnLine enlisted
its readers in "covering" the hurricane crisis, encouraging them to post
reports of flooding in their neighborhoods as part of an ongoing bulletin
board discussion.
The 1999 design continued to highlight the site's
use of Web-only technologies, expanding into remote Web cams and streaming
video. It maintained the site's original commitment to preserving archives
of its locally-produced stories and features, and added an increasing level
of reference by the on-air announcers to the informational, community service
and electronic-commerce features of the Web site. The hot-button polls
may be statistically meaningless, but they and the site's discussion forums
do provide more interactivity than conventional television. In addition,
WRAL-OnLine has formed partnerships with an equally Web-savvy local newspaper,
the News & Observer, to provide local arts and events listings,
a community-service Web-hosting area, http://ncneighbors.com, as well as
a hurricane-emergency site, http://ncstormtrack.com.
WRAL-TV's local and regional roots, combined with
the familiarity of local news "branding," WRAL-OnLine's explorations of
around-the-clock news, and its experiments with online commercial transactions
all position the company well for its new explorations of digital television
broadcasting.
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Feature comparison, WRAL home page, 1995-1999
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Happy Valley 96 |
Blue Bar 97 |
Blue menu 98 |
Silver 99 |
General
description |
Graphic image of community, services; text links below.
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Station slogans for branding; story summaries for news identity
Much local content linked from "Features" heading. |
More efficient compact menu; tv shapes; more site info, promotion &
marketing; less news content |
More direct linkage to feature categories (schools, health, etc.) |
| Total number of links |
13 |
28 |
40+ (plus scrolling index) |
40+ |
| Main menu |
13-Item graphic; text below |
4 horizontal; 11 vertical |
17 |
21 links |
| Head/Sum |
none |
5/5 |
6 |
6 |
| Teases & promotion |
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3 or 4 left col graphic; 4 page bottom text |
Full right column |
Full right column |
| Graphic elements |
Page is all one image, with 14 elements |
News photos with stories |
"TV" photos, Gif-anim teases |
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| TV relationship identifiers |
Station images, antenna, helicopter |
Slogans from the TV station in title bar, text teases; video and audio
link markers |
TV-shape photos, slogan; remote control; graphic teases ; quick weather
forecast |
More prominent link to broadcasters' bookmarks |
| Usability |
Icon-oriented graphic to welcome new users |
Visible menus and visible news content to guide repeat visitors |
Less scrolling; consistent navigation menu |
Fewer layers to reach feature content |
| Interactive features, animation |
Town square link to discussion forum page.; e-mail link (mailbox) |
"Give us your opinion" text tease. |
Hot button poll; java news ticker (moved because of crash problems) |
Daily poll; prominent search; java, e-mail and palm versions |
Bibliography
This paper is part of a dissertation being prepared as part of the
requirements for a doctorate from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For reference list citations,
refer to the latest version of the bibliography
for the full work.
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