Online Content, A Day in the Life - Annual Report 2006

Click2Houston.com, the Website of KPRC, Channel 2, the NBC affiliate in Houston, is produced by Internet Broadcasting Systems Inc., a company that designs and manages sites for about 75 different stations and programs, from Telemundo.com to the syndicated program Access Hollywood.

Click2Houston follows a basic template that several of the stations in the orbit use, though they appear customized somewhat for each station. That template represents the most serious intermingling of editorial and advertising we encountered. The sense one gets is that this site is not controlled by the newsroom. News here is a component of an advertising space.

The design for KPRC features nearly 30 tabs across the top of the page, a major emphasis on weather, and a middle column it calls “2 THE BIG STORY,” where it features a handful of major stories it is emphasizing that include a good deal of multimedia. On May 11, those stories were national as well as local and were changed or updated throughout the day, but the dominant story was a local one — the collision of a light rail train with a car. That story, with its updates, was the top story at 9 a.m., 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. The plane scare was the top story at 1 p.m.

Click2Houston Lead Stories

Below the top three stories came “Latest Headlines” starting with Local and Regional News, then National and World News, and Click2Video. The local and regional news section featured a combination of wire and station-produced content. The national and world news was obviously wire, and the click2video was video listed elsewhere on the page.

But the site stood out more for highlighting features that, though not always labeled explicitly, were clearly paid content, advertorial or just plain advertising, but some of it packaged to look like quasi-editorial content.

Something called “Local 2 Experts,” for instance, says “Learn from the Best! To find a variety of products and services from great companies right here in Houston visit the Local 2 Experts section and find the help you need from our local experts! Click Here for Local 2 Experts!”

Once there, a user found headings such as “siding, concrete restoration, pool, mattress,” and many more. Under each, the visitor got a one-line description of a local company and an invitation to “more details,” which in turn clicked to a formatted online advertorial with a video clip from someone at the local company. Anyone looking for the criteria for selecting the businesses wouldn’t find any. They were advertisers, not the result of any effort by the station to find the best or most expert.

The tab next to that one, “Click2Win”, let users enter contests run by local businesses. The tab next to that, Real Estate, took users to ads for local real estate companies, and so on. There were 20 such tabs linked to advertorial content at the top of the page — from “Dating” (a page “powered by” the online dating company eHarmony) to “Save on Everything,” a link to 34 pages of coupons.

Those 20 advertising tabs, moreover, appear above and below half as many tabs for the news sections of the site, “news, weather, traffic, sports, editorials, money, health, entertainment, and tech.”

By the numbers, Click2Houston fell in the middle of our sample. The top stories were frequently updated (45% were changed sometime during the day on May 11 and another 40% were updated). More than half (55%) of the top stories included video, and 0% still photos. None linked to audio.

But it was the more aggressive intermingling of advertorial and editorial that stood out. By proportion, perhaps more than half of the site appeared to be paid content.