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On Monday, The State Journal-Register launched behealthyspringfield.com, a Web site devoted to coverage of area medical news. SJ-R Executive Editor Jon Broadbooks discusses the project.
Why a medical site? Springfield is a healthcare hub, with two major medical centers and the SIU medical school. There are a number of large medical groups located here. Springfield's medical community serves much of Central Illinois and healthcare is one of the biggest drivers of the local economy.
What was the Web site's mission?: It has two missions, really.
First, it is a consumer site that puts need-to-know information at a reader's fingertips. Prominent are directories for the all-night pharmacies and maps and hours for all the urgent care clinics. We have a comprehensive list of all the medical professionals in the area.
Second, the mission is to provide topical, timely medical news. We feed as much local and national health news on the site as possible. Included are blogs by local medical professionals.
Where did the idea come from? Rockford launched a similar site a number of years ago. SJ-R President and Publisher Scott Bowers (who also is publisher of the Rockford newspaper) thought it would work in this market as well. We took some best practices from Rockford's site and applied it to ours. We also added some features of our own we thought would work well in our market.
Key to our success in launching the site was a partnership with the Sangamon County Medical Society. The organization represents most of the physicians in the market, and they were willing to provide their database and some content in return for higher visibility on the Web site. The partnership gave us instant access to the local medical community in a way that would have been difficult otherwise.
How is the site promoted? We ran house ads promoting the site in advance. We also had page one billboards and breakouts accompanying medical stories in advance of launch. On launch day and the day after we had a large, L-shaped banner that framed the front page and contained information about what readers could find on the site. BHS (as we refer to the site) was heavily promoted on the Web site in advance of and during launch.
Lessons learned? In terms of promotion, we learned a lot from the launch of The Dome, the SJ-R's state government Web site. The Dome allowed us to get a better understanding of how to push traffic from one site to another and cross-promote content. We're doing a better job of trying to plan Web promotion now just as we do for the daily newspaper. We're still getting into a routine with this. There is some content we still have to make sure is pulled onto the site on a regular basis. We will meet weekly to review and adjust things as we go along. We've found that any time you launch a Web site it's useful to come back and do some real-time brainstorming to adjust things.
On Monday, The State Journal-Register launched behealthyspringfield.com, a Web site devoted to coverage of area medical news. SJ-R Executive Editor Jon Broadbooks discusses the project.
Why a medical site? Springfield is a healthcare hub, with two major medical centers and the SIU medical school. There are a number of large medical groups located here. Springfield's medical community serves much of Central Illinois and healthcare is one of the biggest drivers of the local economy.
What was the Web site's mission?: It has two missions, really.
First, it is a consumer site that puts need-to-know information at a reader's fingertips. Prominent are directories for the all-night pharmacies and maps and hours for all the urgent care clinics. We have a comprehensive list of all the medical professionals in the area.
Second, the mission is to provide topical, timely medical news. We feed as much local and national health news on the site as possible. Included are blogs by local medical professionals.
Where did the idea come from? Rockford launched a similar site a number of years ago. SJ-R President and Publisher Scott Bowers (who also is publisher of the Rockford newspaper) thought it would work in this market as well. We took some best practices from Rockford's site and applied it to ours. We also added some features of our own we thought would work well in our market.
Key to our success in launching the site was a partnership with the Sangamon County Medical Society. The organization represents most of the physicians in the market, and they were willing to provide their database and some content in return for higher visibility on the Web site. The partnership gave us instant access to the local medical community in a way that would have been difficult otherwise.
How is the site promoted? We ran house ads promoting the site in advance. We also had page one billboards and breakouts accompanying medical stories in advance of launch. On launch day and the day after we had a large, L-shaped banner that framed the front page and contained information about what readers could find on the site. BHS (as we refer to the site) was heavily promoted on the Web site in advance of and during launch.
Lessons learned? In terms of promotion, we learned a lot from the launch of The Dome, the SJ-R's state government Web site. The Dome allowed us to get a better understanding of how to push traffic from one site to another and cross-promote content. We're doing a better job of trying to plan Web promotion now just as we do for the daily newspaper. We're still getting into a routine with this. There is some content we still have to make sure is pulled onto the site on a regular basis. We will meet weekly to review and adjust things as we go along. We've found that any time you launch a Web site it's useful to come back and do some real-time brainstorming to adjust things.
What's next? We're looking at beefing up directories and consumer-related content. For example, with H1N1 season closing in, we want to better organize links and information for people concerned about the spread of the virus. This is a real opportunity to enhance the site's visibility since we'll have numerous print stories on H1N1. We'll be able key to the BHS Web site for those stories in order to drive traffic. We may add some social networking aspects to the site in the future with Twitter feeds and a Facebook page.
Anything else you want to add? Over the last decade newspapers have aggressively looked at print niche publications. What I've seen is relatively little attention to how to take the print niche emphasis onto the Web. My advice in any market is to figure out the topic or topics that draw the most reader interest. Think how your Web strategy might serve those interest areas.
Jon K. Broadbooks is the executive editor of the State Journal Register.
