Lee Enterprises

Lee Enterprises is a premier newspaper publisher that serves primarily midsize markets in 23 states. The company owns 49 daily newspapers and 300 weekly newspapers and specialty publications. Lee is the fourth-largest publisher of dailies as its weekly publications are distributed to more than 4.5 million households, and its online sites attract more than 12 million unique visitors monthly.

Founded it 1890, Lee Enterprises has delivered news to citizens of the Midwest for over a century, with such famous journalists as Mark Twain, Willa Cather and Thornton Wilder among its alumni. Yet Lee’s trusted publications face the same challenges plaguing all other major players in the newspaper industry: a declining subscriber base and shrinking ad revenue. Lee’s leadership decided that its overriding priority needed to be the strengthening of its online newspaper communities, in order to leverage changes in consumers’ media consumption patterns. In particular, it wanted to integrate user-generated content publishing and other social networking features. The company turned to ThePort, a leading social media provider, to achieve four objectives:

Social Media Suite
ThePort deployed its robust Social Media Suite to create branded online social networking communities for key Lee publications. These new online communities featured multiple elements designed to engage users and increase online participation, including:

In a phased implementation, Lee’s community administrators worked with ThePort to promote ongoing content seeding and help populate fresh, relevant, community-wide content specific to gathering places and topics of interests. This gave subscribers multiple opportunities to congregate, interact and share their voices, so that they stayed longer at the new social networking sites and returned more frequently. In addition, ThePort embedded Remote Content Modules in related newspaper site pages to encourage visitors to submit their own content throughout Lee’s web network. By increasing web site traffic and page views through the integration of social media features, Lee’s online news outlets were further able to offer enhanced advertising opportunities for greater revenue generation.

Social Market 2.0
Lee also leveraged Social Market 2.0, ThePort’s monetization complement to Social Media Suite, to foster direct connections between merchants and consumers while expanding Lee’s revenue model. Social Market 2.0 goes beyond standard online business listings by integrating social media attributes, including the ability for consumers to post comments on merchant pages and “friend” participating merchants of their choosing. Similarly, retailers can add features such as blogs, photos and video, online coupons and promotional offers to their profile pages. Social Market 2.0 provided Lee-owned sites with heavily trafficked promotional channels – for example, bridal marketplaces – to serve local advertisers.

ThePort’s Social Media Suite and Social Market 2.0 made a profound impact on the relationship between key Lee publications and their readers:

Lee Enterprises is extremely pleased with the results of its deployment. “For nearly two years we've explored many exciting new applications for ThePort's social-media platform,” says Jeff Herr, Lee’s director of interactive media. “Along the way, we've discovered the secret path to radically increasing engagement with our local audiences and attracting an entirely new category of advertisers. The transformation is nothing short of remarkable."

That “secret path” to radical results are the 3 three cornerstones of ThePort’s approach:

Connect - In less than a year, Racine’s Journal Times, a Lee-owned publication, increased online readership by 150%, from approximately one million page views to two and a half million.

Engage - Readers post nearly 2.2 million comments on an annualized basis within Lee publications. The Davenport community alone, which is covered by the Lee-owned Quad-City Times, receives more than 75 online user postings per day.

Monetize - In less than two months, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch grew online revenue from its bridal marketplace to $45,000 monthly, with a projected annualized increase of over a half million dollars. One channel, one market, and in just over one month