WHIO Dayton

The Cox CBS affiliate has almost 2.5 million actions on social, 55% of the total engagement generated by the DMA (No. 64), with more than 4.5 million social actions. WHIO is first in actions per post with 113 and leads the market on Twitter actions with almost 83,000. The key? Know what your audience wants and expects to get from you, says Tim Wolff, WHIO’s digital director.

Cox’s CBS affiliate WHIO Dayton, Ohio, leads its nearest local competitor on social media by nearly three times as many actions over the last six months according to Shareablee data. Paul Greeley reports that for the station, where Facebook is central to social strategy, engagement is far more important than sheer numbers.

Atlanta, Boston, Seattle, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Charlotte and Dayton are the latest additions to the Katz Broadcasting network that debuts on April 15.

The classic TV diginet signs affiliates in Dayton, Ohio; Flint-Saginaw-Bay City, Mich.; Eugene, Ore.; Bakersfield, Calif.; and Utica, N.Y.

It was a bold, though not unprecedented, move for Cox Media Group to roll up its television, radio, newspaper and digital properties in Dayton, Ohio, into a single newsroom back in November 2010. By numerous measures, it has paid off. Michael Depp reflects on the effort and the parts that still are gelling.

A new breed of reporter has emerged in the multimedia newsroom of Cox Media Group in Dayton, Ohio — one who can write for the paper and Web, shoot video and produce a story for the evening news. The ability to work in all media is increasingly important, says Jessica Heffner, one of the 10 so-called all-media journalists in Dayton. “Even in companies outside of Cox that don’t own all of these different platforms, media is coming closer and closer together.”

Three years in, Cox Media Group’s bold steps toward convergence with its Dayton, Ohio, TV, newspaper, radio and digital properties are showing measures of success. But, there still is pain, especially in getting all the technical support systems of different media to work together.

Cox Media Group is backing away from an editor’s memo telling staffers at the Dayton Daily News to be nice to CBS. Cox Media Group owns the paper and local CBS affiliate WHIO. Rashida Rawls, a Cox Media Group editor, called out staffers Friday for running a wire story that critiqued America’s most-watched network, saying the paper shouldn’t “run any stories that cast our station in a negative light or even allude to it negatively.”

In Dayton, Cox Media Group is integrating its print, TV (CBS affil WHIO) and radio operations and using the slogan, “Come Together.” According to a memo that staffers received on Friday, coming together means not publishing anything critical about CBS.

Cox Ohio has gathered WHIO-TV, the Dayton Daily News and six other newspapers, three radio stations and various websites under one roof and has established a Breaking News Team that is the key to its cross-media collaboration, gathering stories for all of the company’s Dayton properties.