Multimedia

Coverage
2019

KUTV 2News
Salt Lake City, UT

EDWARD R. MURROW AWARD APPLICATION

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KUTV 2News’ multimedia strategy in 2019 was about “Winning the Day.” That
theme was the foundation of efforts to keep people clicking deeper into the
website on each story, each day - ranging from robust photo galleries to contextual
links.

We executed formatting to each online story that we called taking a user “down
the rabbit hole.” Attention-getting headlines, thumb-stopper images, embeds and
pull quotes were all apart of creating stickiness to KUTV.com. (See example --> )

Furthermore, we combined use of social media to broaden our audience reach and
refer traffic to our stories online. With continuing coverage, we created
comprehensive timeless for users to navigate the lifespan of a story. Applying the
theme, user friendly formatting of each story and complimentary use of social
media to refer traffic to the website increased our page views by 107% for 2019.

We owned the big stories on breaking news that included the kidnapping and
deaths of 5-year-old Lizzy Shelley and 23-year-old MacKenzie Lueck – both tragic,
separate incidents – and a mall shooting that turned out to be gang-related. Each
story included multimedia approaches with website banner alerts and the
combination of social media embedded into online content. (See example of graph
above featuring our website on the Lueck story that includes a URL link embed.)

The top stories for 2019 all involved exercising judgement that would generate
page views with the following in mind:

• Timeliness – Sense of urgency! • Conflict

• Proximity • Human Interest
• Impact / Consequences • Currency
• Prominence • Novelty

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1 - Lizzy Shelley kidnapping, murder

From the first story about the Logan Police

Department soliciting the public’s help to find
Elizabeth “Lizzy” Shelley, the “rabbit hole”
approach was applied with several embeds of
social media posts from the police to keep users
engaged. We generated 450K page views using
that strategy.

More than 50 stories have been written online

since police requested help to find the 5-year-old,
which sadly resulted in investigators cutting a deal
with the child’s uncle who confessed to murdering
her and attempting to hide her body.

Creating a comprehensive timeline story served

the public with a summary of how the tragedy
unfolded. This timeline was then embedded into
prior stories, including the first one about her
disappearance to serve those users who were
entering various related stories at any given time.

We made sure there was a photo gallery with each

of our stories, even if it derived from the
Associated Press. We took the opportunity to
include our coverage and added our own embeds
of social media coverage, contextual links our
KUTV.com stories and photos

Furthermore, 2News was there when the child’s

body was found and capitalized on that with a
Facebook live that held an audience of 5,000 its
entire duration and generated more than 116,000
views. It additionally reached more than 146,000
people, generated more than 58,500 engagements
and was shared 413 times.

We live tweeted Lizzy’s funeral and we also

published the 911 call that reported her missing for
a multi-media presence with embeds in KUTV.com
stories.

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2 - MacKenzie Lueck disappearance, murder

Something that we discovered in user behavior on

KUTV.com and the 2News mobile app is that users are more
likely to get clicks on a video that is after the lead sentence
than merely identified with the player insignia in the hero
shot of the online story. We began putting video after lead
sentences and increased our video views by 73% in 2019.
This became standard procedure beginning with the
MacKenzie Lueck news coverage after she was reported
missing by police June 21, 2019. She hadn’t been seen since
June 17.

Another strategy we implemented was posting video from

livestreams on YouTube. We did this after posting a press
conference on the disappearance of Lueck on YouTube,
which generated 5,615 views. The multimedia approach
enabled KUTV coverage to populate in searches on YouTube
that we hadn’t had before. It also allowed us to add a URL
link in the captioning of the YouTube post to drive traffic to
the website to a related story.
(Exploring livestreaming directly on YouTube is happening in
2020.)

KUTV dominated coverage of Lueck’s disappearance with

continuing coverage. The latest story was digital only
following an exclusive, Feb. 5, that complimented broadcast
coverage but deep-dived into an unsealed warrant using the
“rabbit hole” method. It was comprehensive and provided
our users information they’d only get on KUTV.com

Also, Lueck’s disappearance and murder had some

commonality with a murder of another University of Utah
student, Lauren McCluskey. We livestreamed the vigil that
took place in their honor on our website, Facebook and
Twitter and added information as a public service about how
people can get help if they are in a domestic violence
situation or suspect that someone is.

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3 -Fashion Place Mall shooting
A shooting took place at large mall that allowed the
digital team to use our “take over” page feature. An
example is shown to the right as this feature is
temporary. However, it basically transforms the
home page into a giant display image with a big,
bold headline to indicate a high-impact breaking
news story.

KUTV received several videos and photos from the

public who witnessed the shooting. These
submissions supported a second story that
supported the initial breaking news story and
included a photo gallery and contextual links to
each other.

4 - Viral Stories
We additionally published stories outside of our market that we knew would garner wide appeal and subsequently went viral.
Below are examples:
Entire staffs at 3 Sonic locations quit after wages cut to
$4/hour plus tips (2.6 million page views)

Study: Men with beards carry more germs than dogs do

(1 million page views)

104 arrested in child sex sting, including ER doctor,

church youth director (1.5 million page views)

Michael Jordan’s Utah home lists on the market for $7.5

million (Photo gallery: 280K page views; Story: 270K)

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 5 - Photo Galleries
We know that people love to look at photos! KUTV created slide show content of photos from what the
Beehive State looked like in the early 20th century. The galleries generated more than 3 million page views.

Salt Lake City

Ogden

Logan

Provo

St. George

KUTV’s Top 10 photo galleries in 2019 can be found by clicking here.

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Summary
In summary, KUTV 2News is a data-drive publishing media outlet that focused its efforts in 2019 to be digital first. Not only did our
website page views increase, we also experienced substantial growth as follows:
• Facebook – 21.6% following growth (despite Facebook’s decision to downgrade news)
• Instagram – 52% following growth
• YouTube – 62% following growth
• User-generated-content – 261% growth in viewer submitted video & photos

Thank you for your consideration of an Edward R. Murrow award of Multimedia Coverage. It has been a pleasure to share with you
our digital achievements. Here are some final key statistics:

2019 Total KUTV.com Page Views: 122,889,437 (2018: 59,276,439) 107.31% increase
2019 Total Mobile App: 23,743,345 (2018: 17,465,597) 35.94% increase
2019 Unique Visitor (mo/ave): 2,523,946 (2018: 1,318,602) 91.41% increase
2019 Session Duration (mo/ave): 1:30 (2018: 1:28) 2.74% increase
2019 Pages/Session (mo/ave): 2.24 (2018: 1.92) 16.67% increase
2019 Desktop Percentage %: 18.27% (2018: 24.61%)
2019 Mobile Percentage %: 81.73% (2018: 73.92%)