WKBN picks wrong foe

I generally enjoy my media friends in the Mahoning Valley.

This spring at the Angels of Easter Seals style show, we will all be together to help raise funds for cool kids like my buddy Hunter Crites.

I enjoy sitting on panels with WKBN’s Gerry Ricciutti. He sits to my right, and his hat sits to my left.

Dan Rivers of 570-AM radio is always fun to bump into at golf events and always extends a handshake.

And mornings are never boring on 21WFMJ-TV with Mike Case, Lauren Landy, Jess Briganti and Dave Betras.

(Wait — Betras just thinks he’s part of the lineup. Correct that last line.)

Sure, the media competition is there, but it’s hardly rumble-worthy — like the great “Anchorman” scene when Will Ferrell and his news team kerfuffled with the news teams of Vince Vaughn, Tim Robbins and Ben Stiller.

It’s actually the higher-ups with the bigger paychecks who get a bit more feisty.

Sometimes that feistiness gets a little ridiculous, and that’s the most-kind thing I can say about a promotion sheet that WKBN 27 is cycling around to advertisers in the community.

The headline of the sheet is “WKBN.com is the No. 1 local website visited.”

It restates that claim in the body of the flier.

At the bottom is a chart that shows answers to the question “Which local media website do you go to for breaking news?” That chart put The Vindicator last at 3 percent and, not stunningly, put WKBN-TV first with 29 percent.

They’d have been more credible pushing out charts on YSU basketball’s chances of making the Final Four.

But it’s consistent with what their marketing has done. In the past, they’ve produced commercials that equate walking to your front door for a newspaper akin to riding a stagecoach.

They’ve had ads that take advantage of delivery lapses with newspapers in bushes and on roofs.

Just cheap. We’ve stayed high-road despite these ads, and have never descended to poke at their issues.

I could have, like:

When they swiped 1,500 high-school football players’ names from our website to produce their own website.

Or when they bungled the Valley earthquake coverage, then yelled at me for stating we led it. We did.

Or when they periodically trundle out an ad — one always mysteriously disappears after a few airings — that claims they have the largest news-gathering team. Really? That must be that new Common Core math.

Or how for five years now, this commercial flashes for 2 seconds with Michelle Obama and Jill Biden about veterans that immediately disappears into another commercial.

So now, they have this survey, and it says 11 million people visited them in February, and that a drug story in December got 3 million views in three days, and that measly 3 percent of people polled value The Vindicator for breaking news.

Let’s pretend, for a moment, we can’t tell which ISPs follow our website or subscribe to our Twitter feed. I’m sure they got those numbers somehow with some fragmented slice of our Valley. But for it to be a true measure, consider that in the one statistic, every adult in the five-county market would have had to visit the site 20 times that month.

Every adult. Five counties. Twenty times.

We did a study, too. And it showed us having the most-visited website with an 86 percent score. We maintained the credibility of our survey to at least show WKBN in second place.

But it’s unfair to the advertisers to present dueling surveys that easily can distort reality for whoever pays the tab.

One basic Web tool that no one controls is Alexa — the robotic bean counters for the Internet. They don’t know Youngstown, Ohio, from Youngstown, N.Y. Its online data puts The Vindicator well ahead of WKBN as the most-visited news site.

Or there’s the tool Compete, which doesn’t know our Youngstown from the one in Florida. They, too, have us as tops online in the Valley.

Digitally speaking — there is no better Valley company to be part of than The Vindicator. Add the .com, the multiple sites, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Combine that with print, and you have an audience as large under The Vindicator umbrella as print-only was back in the day.

Combine us with our cousins at 21 WFMJ-TV, and it’s a no-brainer. The smart people at America Makes thought so, and hired WFMJ over a Madison Avenue group.

Local media is in its biggest fight, not with other local media, but with nonlocal revenue suckers such as Facebook and YouTube and Google and groups on Madison Avenue.

When I visit my civic groups and get to talk local media, I of course celebrate The Vindy as a news and advertising vehicle.

But I try to impress upon, in the end, the importance of making advertising decisions with local media, period. It is important that local ad dollars turn back into community coverage of our towns, our kids, our businesses and our taxes.

To get sucked into ad spending that sends money to national websites or to direct mailers is an awful way to invest in your future.

Zero percent of that money helps your town.

That’s the real statistic that needs to be shared.

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.