ON-LINE BRANDING EVOLVES AS SITES FIND PLACE(S) Newspaper name, regional identity and other hooks are used to draw visitors back.

How does a newspaper leverage its brand for its web site? The right question may be whether the brand can be extended ... or even whether it should be? And if a newspaper chooses a new name for its site, how does it build it into a new brand?

Newspapers tend to confuse branding with promotional campaigns, according to Ron Mulder, newspaper consultant and president of Minnesota Opinion Research Inc. (MORI). "They seem to think they can take care of branding with another 13-week campaign -- it's the 'Oh, we've done that and now we can move on' mentality," he adds, asserting that branding is an ongoing effort.

"Just putting a newspaper on-line does not make for a successful on-line product," says Peter Conti, director of interactive media in the publishing division of Media General of Richmond, Va. Conti views the demands of on-line users as vastly different from what they demand of a newspaper, which influences how they perceive brands.

"Our strategy for branding and names is not fully set yet, but people identify with their region and locale," he says. "We think the newspapers should have their own web site branded to the newspaper. But we also feel there is a need for regional brands that tie television and newspapers and other media into a bigger medium so we can go after new customers and ad dollars."

Conti says their objective for newspaper sites is to add an interactive tool to the business operations, providing on-line options for such functions as subscriptions, and delivery starts and stops. Their objective for regional sites is to leverage other media for cross-selling. Conti indicates Media General plans to launch a dozen or more regional web sites before 2002.

Newspapers have always underestimated the value of their brand, claims Earl Wilkinson, executive director of the International Newspaper Marketing Association of Dallas. He argues that publishers recognized the value of their brand only in the 1990s, when they realized their brand was about producing news and information and distributing it in many ways. Wilkinson believes on-line publishing is a distribution extension more than it is a product extension.

Newspaper publishers are wrestling with the definition of value, and the unique or added value a newspaper brand brings to its web site, he says. The focus is on the value of information, timeliness, wire and syndicated copy, and the ease of search and retrieval.

Information is of obvious high value, but less so if it simultaneously appears in print, he claims. Timeliness is increasingly valued in cyberspace, yet many newspaper staffs publish information on their web sites only once a day, typically late at night after the print edition is finished.

The traditional content provided by syndicated/wire service news is available elsewhere, including web sites. While there is value in presenting news and information on newsprint, Wilkinson says publishers should acknowledge that many consumers also value "searchability" based on personal taste or need. He suggests content databases may have more long-term value than just placing content on-line.

This is echoed by marketing consultant Scott Davis, who says: "I don't want the print Wall Street Journal because it is easier to search the on-line version, and it's only $59 per year." Davis believes the major benefit of on-line newspapers is archiving. "Newspapers have to come up with good bundling of print and on-line to avoid losing money," he adds.

EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE In Missouri, Columbia Daily Tribune Managing Editor Jim Robertson indicates the paper's executives continue to "evolve in our thinking about our on-line product." Their original domain name was trib.net, reborn as showmenews.com (Missouri, the Show Me state) to establish a separate identity. "We also wanted a more statewide branding, especially for the classifieds section, which was the most marketable component for distance customers," says Robertson.

But the evolution continues. Showmenews.com will soon morph into columbiatribune.com to reflect the strength of the relationship between the newspaper and the on-line version, says Robertson -- and to make it more intuitive for people to find the site.

"We've come back around to dancing with the girl what brung us," says Robertson. Cross-town rival Columbia Missourian, which is published by the University of Missouri School of Journalism, christened its site the Digital Missourian -- digmo.org.

Knight Ridder's Real Cities project, a national network of local sites, has the insight of pioneers. The San Jose Mercury News launched the Mercury Center on-line product in 1993 on America Online. From the beginning, attempts at branding Mercury Center were frustrating, says Real Cities Marketing Manager Peter Casillas. The intent was to give the site an image beyond just one newspaper and one locale.

"The Mercury News had a high recognition factor, but consumers in focus groups could not get the 'Center' part right ... it did not have a clean, fast recall," he says. The staff then registered or bought several variations of the "mercury" domain name to make sure they all would link to mercurycenter.com.

Nonetheless, the name was missing something. The breakthrough was the realization that the site was trying to serve two audiences -- local consumers and a wider "psychographic audience," says Casillas. That latter group reads the Mercury News' on-line coverage because it closely follows business and technology developments in Silicon Valley with coverage preferred over the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. In February 1999, Knight Ridder started a new web site called siliconvalley.com to address that same audience.

This fall, Knight Ridder added a consumer site for the locals and the Real Cities network. Bayarea.com offers news, entertainment listings and reviews, restaurant reviews, school selection guides, travel maps and directions, health, sports, business and community publishing, as well as 360-degree video reviews of the Bay Area's hottest watering holes. Classifieds in real estate, employment and auto are also carried.

Bayarea.com links web searchers to mercurynews.com, contracostatimes.com (both Knight Ridder newspapers), sfweekly.com and other sites. Casillas estimates that 25 percent of the links provide no revenue but are included to broaden user loyalty.

SF Weekly, a San Francisco alternative weekly owned by New Times Inc. of Phoenix, provides content for bayarea.com in return for print promotion. Bayarea.com is updated several times a day. When users type in mercurycenter.com, they are linked to bayarea.com.

The Real Cities network includes 50 city, regional and specialty web sites. Casillas indicates the network's primary value is for national advertisers while the local sites serve local consumers. Their goal is to consolidate the local sites into a single platform, a "single content repository, a single content management system and a single customer database" by June 2001, says Rohn Jay Miller, KnightRidder.com senior vice president of product and technology.

Real Cities co-marketers include Belo Corp., Gannett Co. Inc., E.W. Scripps, Macromedia Inc. and Blade Communications. Other Real Cities city web sites include charlotte.com, cincinow.com, dfw.com, indy.com, kansascity.com, kentucky.com, miami.com, philly.com, ohio.com, phoenixaz.com and northjersey.com.

TWIN CITIES TRUTH How is branding handled in contested markets? Without a discernible pattern, it seems.

Take the greater Seattle-Tacoma market. The Seattle Times dubbed its web site simply seattletimes.com. Hearst's Post-Intelligencer followed the same pattern with seattlep-i.com.

Knight Ridder's St. Paul Pioneer Press operates twincities.com, but in Minneapolis, the Star Tribune labels its site simply startribune.com.

Same locale, same market. What happened?

In 1995 St. Paul started with pioneerplanet.com to demonstrate the site's intended reach beyond its franchise. "We wanted it to be more than the newspaper on-line, but all our research indicated consumers still thought of it as such," says Site Director Mike Peluso. "We even considered renaming it pioneerpress.com."

A year ago, as part of the Real Cities strategy, the site was renamed twincities.com.

"The name could not be better," says Peluso. "We include things you would not find in a newspaper, such as an extensive annotated directory of local web sites and more entertainment listings than the alternative weekly. You put that together with the newspaper and you have a package that is the best way to extend what the newspaper provides in local news and what the national site can offer."

Peluso says St. Paul's on-line branding is based on the assumption that consumers think locale rather than the local newspaper's name. "The Star Tribune, to my thinking, is a far more traditional newspaper and web site. But it is a good web site and they have a good army behind it," says Peluso.

Numerous attempts to reach Star Tribune executives for comment were unsuccessful.

MORI's Mulder says web site developers need to ask themselves to define the power of their brand and lay out what are they trying to accomplish. "Newspapers' core strength tends to be older people," he asserts. "For younger people, the brand may mean 'too old and stodgy, too much news, not for me.' Newspapers need to decide whom they want to reach and then decide if the engine can pull the cars."

"The News & Observer's web site, the Nando Times, has been very successful," Mulder says of the newspaper in Raleigh, N.C. "They made it into a business and startribune.com seems to be falling into the same path." Both papers are owned by The McClatchy Co. of Sacramento.

Nandotimes.com features a music service called NandoBeat, a personalized information service called InterestAlert, free e-mail, travel booking and a SportServer Police Blotter for those who like to follow all aspects of their favorite players' lives. The News & Observer also has a newspaper site, newsobserver.com.

In October, New York Times Digital launched what it calls its first-ever consumer branding campaign, aimed at making nytimes.com "a place where intelligent and discerning readers can find news and information -- and also the world-renowned perspective, analysis and insight for which the Times brand is known," the announcement stated.

"While the market for Internet news and information is more competitive than ever, it is also becoming clear that a handful of brands will dominate the category in the long-term," New York Times Digital CEO Martin Nisenholtz says in the announcement. The campaign, which will continue into the first quarter of 2001, is based on the tagline, "Mind over chatter" with print headlines such as "mind-altering substance" and "omniscience, updated hourly."

When asked about profitability, none of the executives replied with a forthright affirmative. Mulder states that many may claim their sites are profitable but it really may be more the absence of a loss dragging on profits. "No one is getting wealthy on their sites," he adds.

Most marketing professionals see branding as a complicated, long-term process. Introducing a product -- including a newspaper web site -- does not create a brand. Neither do short promotional campaigns. Brands are the stuff of perceived value. Products and newspapers are made on assembly lines and presses; brands are made in people's minds and emotions.

The most successful newspaper web sites, says Mulder, are those with strong national brand images -- washingtonpost.com, nytimes.com, usatoday.com and wsj.com.

Choosing a brand name and promoting the brand are two issues. The third is audience, a topic perhaps summed up best on the Cox Interactive Media web site: "The Web may be global, but life is local."

Local marketplace factors have a substantial affect on the success of brands:

*What is the print competition in our market?

*What aspects of our market and geography are the focuses of frequent national attention?

*What content sites are compelling in our marketplace and how can we be distinctive and uppermost in mind share?

*Does our corporate organization have other media products that can be integrated for cross selling?

*What media in our area can we co-market with to create a web site for local information consumers that will enjoy high mind share?

The fourth issue, as with any product marketing launch, is having a clear strategy. "Lots of papers are spending lots of money on web sites without any strategy," Peluso asserts. "But people look at Knight Ridder and see an umbrella strategy."

Regardless of the image newspapers may project to younger customers, Wilkinson asserts that newspapers, while experimenting with what works and what does not, have built surprisingly high-quality web sites and did so while under the gun of short-term profits.

"Dot-coms thought they would have a decade to get there," he says. "Suddenly newspapers are looking pretty damned good."

-- Roger S. Peterson, e-mail: rsp@newsinc.net