February of 2011 was an invigorating, exasperating, challenging, and occasionally surreal time for most Wisconsinites.
But if you were part of a news organization, you were down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, and up to your ears in the chaos and cacophony that followed the introduction of Scott Walker’s now-famous budget repair bill.
For the folks at WisconsinEye, however, the challenges were even keener, the atmosphere even more electric, and the sense of urgency even greater.
“Our traffic to our website increased by an order of magnitude last year in February and March,” said Chris Long, president and CEO of WisconsinEye, a 24/7 public affairs news channel featuring gavel-to-gavel coverage a la C-SPAN. “We were serving through WisEye.org a national and international audience. We were actually feeding our content to Al Jazeera at that time.”
| “We’ve heard from the very beginning from those institutional users how valuable our presence is, and how they wanted a more user-friendly version of WisconsinEye.” – Chris Long, president and CEO of WisconsinEye |
Sounds like the best of all possible worlds for any news organization, but for a nonprofit dedicated to offering nonpartisan, unfiltered, unbiased content as a public service to a statewide audience, the downside was obvious.
“Last year, we were serving an enormous direct public audience – on certain days we had 10,000 viewers watching video – and that is an enormous technical and economic challenge, because streaming video from a business standpoint is still very problematic,” said Long, who was director of new media for C-SPAN from 1999 until 2003. “Every time you get a viewer, it increases your costs.”
If there’s any disadvantage to being highly visible and sought out, then, both WisconsinEye and Scott Walker had found it.
Luckily, says Long, WisconsinEye, which launched its service five years ago, had already started down the path toward both serving its users better and finding new revenue streams that could offset some of the costs of delivering such a wealth of content.
Indeed, at the same time WisconsinEye’s staff of 11 was working around the clock to cover the goings-on around the Capitol, it was also working on a new project – MyWisconsinEye, a subscription service geared toward professionals, businesses, and other organizations looking for a tool that would allow them to zero in on the content they found most relevant to their own industries or fields of endeavor.
“We’ve heard from the very beginning from those institutional users how valuable our presence is, and how they wanted a more user-friendly version of WisconsinEye,” said Long. “And of course last year, in terms of what was happening here in Wisconsin, many folks discovered the value of unedited, nonpartisan coverage of government. And we found a whole new audience, but we also heard from institutional customers who wanted us to make it more user-friendly. ‘I need to know when you’re going to cover something so I don’t need to be at the Capitol. I need to be able to get to the video very quickly to find out what I’m looking for.’ … So it’s a very new direction for us. It’s a way of generating revenue, to basically offset the cost of providing the free service.”
Finding needles in haystacks
Right now, WisconsinEye is largely privately supported through a bipartisan community of donors consisting of foundations, individuals, groups and associations, and corporations. MyWisconsinEye, which launched in January, allows WisconsinEye to leverage its copyrighted content while giving subscribers a valuable set of tools for customizing delivery of that content. (Single subscriptions are currently $695 for six months and $1,295 for 12 months. For details, click here.)
Those tools allow users to track specific pieces of legislation, other legislative business, and state Supreme Court cases, and to search for events and topics using keywords and subfilters that allow the system to find content and notify users about specific coverage of interest to them. So instead of wading through the 40 or so hours of coverage WisconsinEye produces each week, users can easily target what’s most useful.
Users also have the option of getting alerts through email or text messages. And because the system looks at itself every five minutes, it’s constantly updating available content.
But the service goes beyond simply acting as a sort of DVR for policy wonks. In addition to finding legislative hearings of interest to one’s business, one can target specific parts of those hearings, zeroing in on a particular speaker, for example. So the system can tell you that a speaker appeared 41 minutes into a video and was done speaking at 47 minutes. You can then create a clip of that appearance, complete with an embed code that can be used in reports. If you want, you can also edit that six-minute clip down to suit your own needs.
“When we show this to people, their eyes light up,” said Long. “And these are folks who already use us and for whom we’re already valuable. But when we put this tool into their hands, it’s like going from a handsaw to a power saw in terms of using this service as a business tool. They get it.”
The savings in person-hours was already clear to most businesses that turned to WisconsinEye for coverage, said Long. With the new tool, however, that advantage is magnified.
“We’d already become the proxy for many groups and organizations; we were already saving them a lot of hours in terms of having to sit in this building and wait for things to happen,” said Long. “They could just sit in their office and be highly productive, just have the TV on and wait for things to happen. With this, they can focus even further. They don’t even need to be there. They know we’re going to cover it. We give them a notice when it’s happening, when it’s available. They can go in and find precisely what they’re looking for. This adds this next level of value to the service.”
A customer-focused solution
While WisconsinEye is one of about two dozen public affairs networks across the nation that serve statewide audiences (in addition to WisEye.org, WisconsinEye is available on Charter Channel 995 and Time Warner Channel 363), MyWisconsinEye is fairly cutting edge.
“The network in Washington state launched about the same time that we launched MyWisconsinEye, completely independently, it launched a kind of filtered view,” said Long. “But it is not specifically intended for the business community the way ours is, and it doesn’t have quite the range of features that ours does in terms of notifications and all the things we put into this specifically tailoring it from the beginning to be a business tool. …
“It’s fair to say that we’re using technology here in a next-level kind of way.”
That technology was developed locally by Yahara Software, a Madison-based software developer, and drew on the feedback of members of the business community who regularly use WisconsinEye.
“I think from a business standpoint, it’s a good story in terms of the voice of the customer, developing something that people asked us to do,” said Long. “We did a lot of market research, surveys, beta test groups, focus groups, and talking to people about things we might be able to do. But we winnowed it down to a set of features.”
Preparing for more
As things begin to come full circle from the manic, controlled chaos of the February 2011 Capitol protests to the slightly more orderly and genteel recall process, WisconsinEye is gearing up for a busy electoral season.
It goes without saying that the blogosphere will be abuzz. At the same time, however, Wisconsin residents will no doubt be looking for the kind of coverage WisconsinEye has perfected.
“I think in the new media environment where opinion thrives and point of view thrives, there is still a healthy need for what’s true and what is false,” said Long. “That’s the kind of journalism that we do – we call it surveillance journalism. … We provide that monitoring function that creates that baseline upon which all these other kinds of discussions can be based, because we provide a level of fact and what is true and what is false that I think really contributes to a productive discussion.
“I think in that context, we are the fact provider, and I think with increasing frequency, we’re seeing references both within the building itself and also in public discourse, ‘go to WisconsinEye and see what that person says, see what happened.’ That’s where I think our value becomes very clear in terms of supporting all these other forms of discourse, whatever they are.”
Sign up for the free In Business Wisconsin Report – your weekly resource for local business news, analysis, voices, and the names you need to know. Click here. If you are not already a subscriber to In Business magazine, be sure to sign up for our monthly print edition here.
