Market Profile

Chicago’s media economy is flat to last year in terms of spending and pricing. And that’s actually pretty impressive, since the market was very strong in 2012 with political and Olympics spending. TV is expected to remain flat to last year or rise slightly as the year progresses, as most dayparts are starting to tighten for summer.

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.

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.

Pennsylvania will once again be an important swing state in the 2012 presidential election, and that should mean record-setting political spending in Pittsburgh, where the surrounding counties lean Republican, as President Barack Obama tries to win votes in industrial areas of the country in his bid for reelection.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.”

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 traditional media sites rule the online roost in the city that was the cradle of democracy in this country, community-driven sites are proliferating, serving a market hungry for local news and sports. Philadelphia boasts some 260 blogs and hyperlocal news sites and possibly more on the way.

This tiny market may have been slow to embrace the Internet, but its local online ad scene is now set to grow faster than many large ones, according to Borrell Associates. While the region’s media outlets are still adopting social media and developing mobile apps, Borrell predicts local online advertising here will more than double, rocketing 115%, to $33.8 million, by 2015.

Local online media is booming in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy, N.Y., marketplace — the region clocks in as the nation’s second-fastest growing online ad market — with a large stable of newspaper and TV sites ready to feed the area’s politics-crazy audience.