Last year, local NBC news affiliate WRC/NBC4’s web site got a major facelift. Gone was the relatively dull NBC4.com, and in its place was a nationally-launched web site template, in this case nbcwashington.com, that’s trying to be both a home for the news content of WRC, as well as its own online brand, offering aggregated and exclusive content on top of the station’s regular stories.
In a media landscape where everyone’s scrambling to compete with blogs and aggregators and carve out a toehold on the internet, the move made sense. But lately, the product itself is getting some major pushback from readers.
The problem? Nbcwashington.com is trying to offer a variety of content, from videos, to straight news stories, to bloggier, lighter pieces. The funny stuff has largely been outsourced to freelancers Jim Newell and Sara K. Smith, both associate editors of political satire site Wonkette.com. Each are writing one or two exclusive posts a day for nbcwashington.com, often about a local D.C. politics story, and they are writing them exactly as if they were intended for Wonkette. But nbcwashington.com has placed Newell’s and Smith’s comedy pieces into the same Local News stream where readers expect to find regular news stories. If you subscribe to nbcwashington.com’s Local News-specific RSS feed, on any given day you can be treated to a list of headlines that range from, as they did last Wednesday, standard local TV news fare like “Man Shot, Killed in Hyattsville” and “Follow Proper Netiquette on Social Networking Sites,” to “Becoming Mr. Policeman Is So Easy Now,” a comedy piece penned by Newell based on reporting by the Examiner.
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The same tone and style you expect on Wonkette, more or less. Which might work, if nbcwashington.com differentiated at all between Newell’s comedy posts and their straight crime and service journalism stories. But they don’t really. Instead, readers have to scroll down to the bottom to find a cryptic, possible explainer noting that “Jim Newell locks people up for Wonkette and IvyGate.” For casual local news readers, folks who don’t spend their time on political comedy blogs and are just looking for the day’s headlines, how do these types of posts, tucked in between serious news stories, resonate? Just check out the comments.