Small-Town Paper Goes Hyperlocal
by Matt on May 28, 2010 in Industry
HLB reader and commenter Geordie Romer pointed me toward this interesting news: The Wenatchee World, a small-town newspaper in central Washington, has just announced plans to start a network of hyperlocal sites:
It’s a simple idea, really. The Wenatchee World creates websites for each of the communities we serve, then turns them over to residents to use as online gathering places.
We show people how to post stories, meeting notices, community events, photos and much more. We also include stories and photos by our newsroom staff.
Soon, the sites are rich with intensely local and fresh information of high interest to those in the community. People go there to see what’s going on and to interact with their neighbors.
Community members moderate the sites, keeping interactions constructive and civil.
The first site isn’t public yet, but … ahem … they forgot to prevent search engine spiders from crawling the new site, and you can see it now at cashmere.ncwcommunities.com. (I’m assuming it’ll get its own domain when it launches? Hope so.)
This is intriguing to me in light of my comments yesterday about small-town papers having a longer shelf life right now than big city and national papers. The World obviously sees the writing on the wall. As Managing Editor Cal FitzSimmons wrote, “We’re doing something good for our communities and reinventing ourselves in the process.”
No related posts.
Comments
2 Responses to “Small-Town Paper Goes Hyperlocal”
Leave a Reply (please use your real name; company names & other keyword-based names will be deleted)
-
-
Featured Video
Ambitious and cool to see somebody putting their local resources to work, not outsourcing the whole business to a boiler room sales team in Bellevue. We expect to see more of this but we also think there is room for bringing package solutions like our Neighborlogs and others into the equation because not everybody is going to want to invest so heavily on the development side of things. Take your existing content and sales resources and find affordable tools to better scale the business. Thanks for a good example of this playing out.
[...] in hyperlocal (e.g., CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, The Guardian, Seattle Times, etc., etc.), about small-town papers going hyperlocal … and yet we barely talk about what HelloMetro.com is [...]