Digital DMAs

Break-ups in the Web partnerships of some of the Alamo City’s traditional media players have produced three of San Antonio’s top digital outlets, including those of KSAT and KENS. The splits have also sparked some creative social and mobile efforts around San Antonio’s music scene and beloved Spurs basketball team.

Nearly a third of Roanoke, Va., residents aren’t online, but it isn’t for a lack of first-rate digital offerings, including some of the slickest multimedia production to be found on any newspaper website, plus apps, blogs mobile sites and more. WSET-TV, The Roanoke Times and other local players are gearing up for a predicted 89% boost in digital revenue in this sleepy southern town.

Digital spending is slightly behind the national average in Steeler Nation, but two newspapers and a market leading ABC affiliate WTAE are making big moves to capitalize on inevitable growth, as local online spending in the Steel City is expected to grow 74% by 2016.

With its glamour and Latino flair, media players in Miami, a market characterized by an audience fragmented by culture and language, rely on different strategies — from hyperlocal to mobile — to draw visitors and prosper. Market leader The Miami Herald, with English and Spanish sites, has turned to hyperlocal, offering some 45 specialized sites based on community and subject matter. And Fox affiliate WSVN has tripled its mobile traffic in the past year.

A concerted investment in social media and a new website have helped Dispatch Broadcast Group’s WTHR increase its audience and enhance its profile in the Indianapolis digital scene. Harder news reigns at the market’s online leader The Indianapolis Star, where computer assisted reporting is deepening content.

In Charm City, the only daily paper, The Baltimore Sun — which went behind a paywall in October — rules the roost, but Baltimore’s TV stations are taking some bold strides on the mobile front in an effort to draw bigger audiences and change the digital media pecking order.

With a towering 3 million-plus uniques in October, Gannett’s carefully nurtured online operation, which combines the efforts of its NBC affiliate KPNX and its Arizona Republic, swamps its nearest competitors, MyFoxPhoenix.com and Scripps’ ABC15.com. Along with winning in audience, AZCentral now generates 20% of Gannett’s total revenues in the sprawling Phoenix DMA.

Backpack journalists have been a boon to traffic at WOWT.com, where reporters file stories from smart phones and four TVU technology-powered units being tested by parent company Gray Television. The station and its bigger online rival, World-Herald-owned Omaha.com, are bristling with apps to serve a population that accesses much of its digital news on mobile devices.

The modestly-sized California market is poised to experience some massive mobile advertising spend increases, and Gannett and KESQ are getting ready for the boom.

For Oklahoma City’s online media players, mobile has taken hold much sooner than anybody could anticipate. The city’s main newspaper and online leader The Oklahoman saw a nearly 70% increase in mobile traffic over the past year.

In Vermont, a state where town hall meetings have held an honored place for 200 years, social media seems like a natural fit. After Tropical Storm Irene cut a swath of devestation through the region earlier this year, Burlington media used Facebook and Twitter to get info out to the community.

In a market where media outlets have eschewed sensationalism in favor of serious and investigative journalism, McClatchy Newspapers’ Kansas City Star not only leads in online traffic, but has created two dozen spinoff sites, targeted to topics like high school sports, local pets, politics and religion. Meredith’s KCTV5.com ranks second in traffic, thanks in part to the station’s award-winning investigative reports.

Fox, Tribune, Cox and Post-Newsweek all have media outlets in busy, tourist-enlivened Orlando, Fla., where the sensational Casey Anthony trial offered opportunity for a hotbed of related apps, streaming video and social media experimentation.

In Albuquerque, N.M., the Albuquerque Journal’s paywall — erected in 2001 — has let the rest of the market’s online players catch up to the top site. Now, with aggressive mobile plans, the area’s TV sites are poised to break out.

In a region marked by unique online efforts, innovative approaches, such as KHQ’s Web-only news segments and QR code-driven online content, help local television sites stay ahead of the city’s daily newspaper for the hearts and  clicks of Spokane, Wash.’s Web audience.

In Mississippi’s capital, the city’s local online media players are taking advantage of the region’s love for high school and college football to drive traffic to their websites.

In Atlanta, online media makes up 20% of a slow-growing $2.4 billion local ad pool — a number only expected to hit $2.7 billion by 2016, according to Borrell Associates — and it’s hometown media company Cox Enterprises that makes the biggest splash in that pool, running the market’s top newspaper and TV sites.

Surrounded by the flashier digital markets of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, digital players in California’s state capital have made a splash with innovative hyperlocal and social efforts.

For a market with fewer than 1 million people, Portland, Maine, boasts a spate of online news outlets from newspaper and television station sites to public broadcasting outlets, all guided with a sense of purpose.

From mobile apps to online-first efforts and daily deals, local online media outlets in Oregon’s “Rose City” are aggressively experimenting with new ways to tap into the ever-expanding digital market.

Cleveland’s online players find themselves in the middle of the debate over anonymous comments. The city’s top site, Cleveland.com was even the subject of legal action over its comment policy, but the site still sees comments as a way to boost interactivity.

St. Louis is a web of individual communities with strong identities and the most effective digital news players in the market have figured out how to weave themselves into that web, one comprising users who epitomize a humble, conservative Midwest sensibility. But it was a spring tornado that really sparked online traffic.

In a market overshadowed by northern neighbor Los Angeles, The Orange County Register is testing the possibilities offered by nascent mobile technology.

Despite the loss of one of its primary newspapers two years ago, Denver’s local digital media scene is thriving. From the online market leaders KUSA and The Denver Post to smaller outlets including an alternative weekly and several nonprofits, all are carving out a chunk of an online ad pie that is expected to grow 71% by 2015.

Hyperlocal news, daily deals and an increasingly competitive online news and sports scene mirror Buffalo’s emergence from its past as a Rust-Belt has-been.

Cincinnati’s neighborhood sentimentality and diversity, has made the city a proving ground for various hyperlocal efforts, including Gannett’s Porkappolis location-based mobile app.

In the City of Angels, it’s the usual players — main daily the Los Angeles Times and the top TV stations — that dominate the local online media landscape. And while AOL’s Patch has made its presence felt, few other indie sites have had any impact in L.A.

Augusta, Ga., may be a small market, but its main newspaper, the Augusta Chronicle, is making big noise as one of the few sites to have found success with a metered paywall. Competition from local TV outlets, three of which are owned by Media General, is tepid.

In a city that has been through a lot in the past few years, New Orleans’ online players win over the loyalty of their audiences with a dedication to local news and a little something extra — or as they say in New Orleans, “lagniappe.”

In the small Columbia-Jefferson City, Mo., market, newspaper and television sites are taking their cue from the University of Missouri’s respected journalism school and trying out new ways to present and monetize online media.

Dallas-Fort Worth features a fragmented online news market, in which many outfits thrive in their chosen subjects, however narrow. Even those that are part of Dallas-Fort Worth’s “Big Six” — the major newspaper and TV sites — display penchants for local and niche content.

In a market with fierce competition from a myriad of newspaper and television sites vying to be No. 1, Gannett chooses the sunny Tampa-St. Petersburg market as the online proving ground for its bold experiment in hyperlocal news sites.

Though the Austin American-Statesman dominates the city’s online media scene, The Texas Tribune, a tiny nonprofit local news site, is taking off and generating a lot of buzz for its political coverage in the Texas capital. Coming in at 20% to 21% for exposure were the market’s major TV Web sites, KVUE.com (the ABC affiliate), KXAN.com (NBC) and News8Austin.com/YNN.com (Time Warner Cable).