Milwaukee may be a one-newspaper town, but in cyberspace, there’s a media war for the eyeballs of the young and trendy.
A decade ago, OnMilwaukee.com pioneered coverage of nightlife, entertainment and “lifestyle” news on the Web. Now it faces growing competition. Last year, the Shepherd Express alternative weekly overhauled its Web site, renamed ExpressMilwaukee.com, with more timely entertainment, breaking news and more ways for readers to connect. Now a newcomer has muscled onto the electronic turf: Milwaukee.Decider.com, spawn of the successful Onion faux-newspaper empire.
Of course, the execs at all three publicly welcome their rivals. “Competition’s a good thing,” says Andy Tarnoff, OnMilwaukee.com co-owner. Yeah, right.
OnMilwaukee.com– often known as OMC – was launched in September 1998 by Tarnoff and two business partners after Tarnoff quit a public relations job.
“The newspaper wasn’t telling the stories people my age were really talking about. Milwaukee Magazine had a different demographic. The Shepherd Express was more political, and certainly there was nothing online,” Tarnoff says.
OMCstarted doing Yellow Pages-like listings and soon realized people wanted features. So OMC started doing them. “That quickly became what was more popular,” Tarnoff notes.
Today, the company occupies a suite of offices above a bank at North and Farwell avenues and employs 15 people. It’s closely held with some “very rich” outside investors, Tarnoff says.
While the Shepherd Express has been online longer, until last year’s makeover, the digital version mostly just replicated the print paper. Now it’s far more robust, offering technological bells and whistles and posting information about five to eight events a day, as well as stories that may be expanded in a future print edition.
Then there’s Milwaukee Decider – an offshoot of A.V. Club, the national and local pop culture weekly wrapped inside The Onion. Milwaukee Decider is one of 10 such sites either up or planned across the country.
“We cover the pop culture of Milwaukee in an A.V. Club style,” says Milwaukee Decider Editor Steve Hyden– a mix of “funny and irreverent, but … also really smart and informed.” He says Decider writers bring a fan’s enthusiasm to the topic and aren’t reflexively scornful or “hipper-than-thou.”
Of the three sites, OMC offers the most consistent and comprehensive content. It’s also been savvy about partnerships, such as one with BizTimes Milwaukee, whose editor, Steve Jagler,cross-posts his blog to OMC. And it’s the go-to site for sports coverage – former Journal Sentinel sports writer Drew Olsonis OMC’s senior editor and longtime local sports fixture Dave Begelblogs there as well.
Express Milwaukee offers the most extensive coverage of government and politics, but with a predictable lefty cast.
Milwaukee Decider has the bloggiest sensibility. Its posts are shorter, crisply amusing. Its site is the least-cluttered, with as few as a half-dozen headlines on the home page. Adding to its bloggy feel, its posts are stuffed with links to other sites. Case in point: a two-paragraph summary of the finale of the most recent “Bachelor” TV series (when Jason Mesnickdumped his first choice in favor of Milwaukee resident Molly Malaney) pointed readers to OMC stories, JS blogs by Tim Cuprisinand Lori Price,and Entertainment Weekly, even a broader Milwaukee Magazine story (about the city’s inferiority complex).
Is there really room in the Brew City’s bandwidth for three different takes on entertainment here? Andy Vogel, a veteran of online operations at both the Journal Sentinel and the Shepherd, says revamping the Shepherd site into Express Milwaukee produced “pretty significant growth” early on. Web traffic analyses show that, so far, Express Milwaukee outranks Milwaukee Decider by about 7-to-1 in monthly traffic – but OMC dwarfs them both, with four times the number of monthly visitors as the Shepherd’s site.
It’s too early to evaluate Decider’s long-term prospects. But the numbers at both OMC and Express Milwaukee seem to have plateaued. More and more people, Vogel notes, are relying on social networking to keep abreast of what’s important. The winners in the online media war may be those that forge the tightest connections with readers through sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Decider’sand Express Milwaukee’s roots in print publications give them a brand identity that could carry them through the sour economy. But Vogel – who’s now director of sales for the Infosoft Group, which operates MilwaukeeJobs.com and some 900 other such sites across the country – isn’t so sure.
OMC,he says, could be the long-term winner. Having started earlier, it’s still far ahead. And as a Web-only effort, it’s always operated “in kind of a skinny mode.”
The latter could be critical, Vogel adds: “It’s not going to end well for anybody who has a huge cost structure.”
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Journal SentinelEditor Martin Kaiserargues that last month’s column saying the paper had “killed” its Waukesha edition was overstated. The section is down to twice a week, he notes, and there’s additional coverage through the “Now” weekly wrapped inside the paper.
