Researcher's Bio
George Sylvie
Associate Professor, Journalism Department, University of Texas at Austin
George Sylvie is an expert on technology, change, innovation and decision-making in the newspaper industry. Sylvie’s latest research focuses on newspaper editors’ styles and decision-making values, in addition to newspaper online advertising markets. He is also studying the viability of long distance, online advertising for electronic newspapers. Sylvie has co-authored several structural analyses of online newspaper markets, discovering that all online newspapers attract traffic from outside the print edition’s primary circulation area. In addition, he co-authored a leading media management textbook, Media Management: A Cascade Approach, in its fourth edition.
Forum Leader
Esther Thorson
Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research, Missouri School of Journalism
"E-Papers: Changing Markets, Changing Content"
At least one third of all visitors to local newspaper websites live outside the newspaper’s geographic market. Many newspaper managers believe these visitors are of little use to local advertisers. But Sylvie’s data showed some surprises about out-of-area visitors that newspaper ad managers may be able to use in ad sales.
He said newspaper websites have two audiences, local visitors and long-distance visitors, but newspaper managers tend to ignore distance users even though distance users have strong demographics. Long-distance users tend to be male (60 percent), older (65 percent are more than 45 years old), better educated, (55 percent were college graduates or above) and more affluent (73 percent earned $50K or more), based on a Belden Associates 2007-2008 study of 28 newspaper websites. Perhaps more important, long-distance users have strong area ties. Nearly two thirds are former residents, part-time residents and visitors, or have friends and family in the local market area.
"Long-distance users have a psychic attachment to the local newspaper site," Sylvie said. They tend to have a longer history of visiting the local website and tend to be more satisfied with the newspaper's site than the average local user, he found. "They probably are a little bit more of a connoisseur of the site than your local user," he said.
Long-distance users also tend to be more loyal than local users and their usage tends to exceed that of local users, he said. Long-distance users may not be interested in ads for local businesses on a newspaper's site, but they may be interested in other kinds of advertising. This needs more study, he said, to see what opportunities may exist for ads targeted at distance users.
Sylvie urged ad managers to frame this audience to advertisers as "gravy or bonus" in terms of audience.
Contact Professor George Sylvie at 512-471-1783 or g.sylvie@mail.utexas.edu