Nexstar’s Digital Content Influencers for Oct/Nov

It’s time to highlight #NexstarNation digital journalists who’ve gone above and beyond to work towards goals, improve their station’s digital content offerings, and assist their regional neighbors. These are our Digital Content Influencers for October:

Jeff Wiehe has extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the judicial system and has turned that into a successful beat. As a digital reporter at WANE, he works through court documents daily to flush out interesting and unusual crime stories that have resulted in more than 3.2 million pageviews this year to WANE.com.
Kelly Maricle is the heartbeat of WHO-TV’s digital team. As the station’s top author, she’s a big reason they’ve hit goals every month of 2022. In October, she’s WHO’s top byline by 2x and is on pace to produce 60 stories.
We’ve already highlighted Michael Garcia’s work in this note, and we’re doing it again! Since joining the KETK team in September, Michael has had a strong impact on local pageviews. His stories have netted nearly 30% of the station’s traffic in October and he’s a large part of why KETK has already hit its monthly goal.
George Stockburger has helped grow Harrisburg’s digital audience, which has more than doubled year over year. WHTM hit their annual goal this week, thanks in part to the traffic from the Pennsylvania Senate debate on Tuesday. The national interest in this race pushed the station past 1.25 million pageviews that day, with George bringing in 60% of those — all while coordinating the debate’s digital coverage across 11 stations.
WAVY’s Courtney Ingalls made a big impact in Virginia with her coverage of Hurricane Ian’s impacts on tidal flooding. Just 5 months in her new role at WAVY, she’s the top author for their site and the region so far this month.
Joining Nexstar in July, Digital Director Marc Sternfield has quickly turned the tides at KTLA and led his team to achieving their monthly goal in August, September, and October. His aggressive approach to owning breaking news and producing content based on audience-interest trends has been instrumental in KTLA’s recent success.
Kevin Accettulla has led the team at WBTW to hitting pacing goals 7 of the 10 months of 2022 — including October. He’s had the top byline for wbtw.com this month and authored the site’s top story. Kevin is a fantastic team player and has a great eye for spotting strong content.

These are our Digital Content Influencers for November:

Seth Austin, digital lead at WEHT/WTVW in Evansville, Indiana, is a strong leader who cares deeply about the digital product. Seth has led his team to big growth this year. They should hit their YTD pageview goal in the next few days!
Evan Anstey was instrumental in WIVB’s coverage of the winter storm that dropped more than 7 feet of snow on some areas of Western New York. His efforts helped WIVB.com rack up more than 900,000 pageviews on the biggest day of the storm, leading the site to its second-highest traffic day of the year.
KELO digital lead Karen Sherman created an extremely thorough election plan that resulted in KELOLAND.com being the only local outlet to show up on page 1 of Google search for “South Dakota Election Results.” As a result, KELOLAND.com PVs for Nov. Election Day and the day after were up 100% compared to their June primary 2-day window, with search visits growing by 91%. See her election plan, which was also used as an example for other stations to mirror, here.
Caitlyn Rooney, a site producer at KAMC/KLBK, was Lubbock’s top author for November. Her work accounted for roughly 15% of the site’s pageviews last month. Caitlyn’s stories are a large part of why Lubbock hit their monthly pacing goals.
Moving to digital from broadcast only a few months ago, new Colorado Springs digital lead Sarah Ferguson did a great job guiding her team through the tragic Club Q nightclub mass shooting incident. Her team was aggressive with owning the story from the very beginning (overnight hours) and as a result they found themselves ranking among top national publications in Google search.
Ashley Anderson has been with CBS17 in Raleigh since early 2022 and has recently helped to lead the team during a transition period to successfully hit KPI goals. The site was 109% to goal on pageviews and 115% to goal on visits in November and has already hit its year-end goal for visits, with pageviews not far behind!
In the past few months since joining the KLFY team as a digital producer, Bjorn Morfin has solidified his status as one of the top PV earners on his digital team (No. 1 author the last two months) — and in the region. Bjorn is a diligent writer who is always looking for stories that resonate with KLFY’s audience.