Go Local Tacoma launches ‘The Go Page’

We are excited to announce the launch of the new and completely remodeled TownLuxe platform. The curtain was pulled back Thursday night at the Varsity Grill in Tacoma at a special launch party with our new partners, Go Local Tacoma.

This goal of the site is to become a destination for local shoppers to learn what’s happening with local businesses every day. Go Local Tacoma, which supports local independent businesses, is using it on their website to create interest in their mission. They are calling it “The Go Page.”

To help power the era of social networking for small businesses, we rebuilt the TownLuxe platform to make it easy for local business owners to post to the site while sharing their messages on Facebook and Twitter. Local users will also be posting about their latest shopping score, killer bargain or amazing deal and can connect it to their Facebook or Twitter account.

Visitors to the site will see what others have discovered and be able to see what’s happening with local business in their favorite neighborhood. Read the rest of this entry »

Newsgarden powers Stanford journalism project

By Jay Huerbin

Last fall, Stanford University launched a hyperlocal news site called Silicon Valley Pulse. With the help of Serra Media, the Newsgarden became part of Stanford’s graduate program for journalism — a department that isn’t afraid to test the latest advancements in new media.

“Stanford’s journalism program, while small — there are 16 students this year — prizes experimentation, innovation and new ideas,” Drake Martinet said about the new site, the Pulse. “The Pulse is just one of our many ongoing experiments with emerging tools.”

Martinet, a masters journalism student at Stanford and one of the leaders for the Pulse, teamed up with Stanford professor Ann Grimes and Serra Media co-founder Mark Briggs to get the site under way.

An independent project by Stanford graduate students, the Pulse has found success by teaming up with local newspapers at times. With little marketing, the majority of the site’s traffic, Martinet said, comes from whenever the Pulse is mentioned and linked in different newspaper sites and local blogs.

In December, graduate student Kathryn Roethel ran a story about a Make-A-Wish child and his trip to Disneyland on the Newsgarden.

“The [San Francisco Chronicle] wanted to run it, but we deiced to put it on the Pulse and have them link over to us,” Martinet said about Roethel’s story. “We had a significant image gallery with the story that was attached to the article and we were able to have more control at the Pulse.”

When the story ran, the Pulse saw nearly 3,000 unique page views and 5,000 visitors. Read the rest of this entry »

Another Serra Media intern moving on

Aaron Ritchey

Aaron Ritchey, our “web ninja” for the past 9 months, has joined the team at Paper G as a software engineer. He is part of the technical team working on the PlaceLocal web application. It’s a terrific opportunity with a promising company and we certainly wish Arron the best.

He wrote a lot of code for us and squashed a lot of bugs. His talents will come in handy at Pager G as he is working with both the user interface and the back-end systems.

“Being able to work at Serra Media has kept my programming skills sharp,” Ritchey said. “If I had not been practicing, I could imagine not being as confident in the solutions I gave to the technical questions in the interview.

“I continue to appreciate the opportunity to practice my skills at Serra Media. It helped keep me in shape mentally, and I enjoyed being able to do something productive.”

We enjoyed working with Aaron and continue to appreciate everything he accomplished while a part of our team. Good luck at Paper G!

- Mark Briggs

Internships available at Serra Media

Come help us build interactive digital platforms for local publishers, independent journalism start-ups and university journalism programs.

Serra Media is looking for smart people who are enthusiastic about local content, collaborative publishing and the future of digital news and information.

If that’s you, check out the details on Serra Media’s Internship Program and apply today.

RELATED:

• Serra Media intern moves on to MSN
• Hyperlocal comes into focus for Serra Media intern
• My international hyperlocal experience
• The importance of a community manager
• New report: How to build a user community online
• New in town? Let hyperlocal sites, Twitter and iPhone apps be your guide

- Mark Briggs

Serra Media intern moves on to MSN

Amy exploring Seattle.

Delivering some bittersweet news today: Amy Rainey, Serra Media’s first, and longest-serving intern, will be leaving us after taking a full-time position at MSN.com. Amy has been indispensable in helping us grow our hyperlocal communities and her aptitude and cheerful attitude will be missed.

In June 2009, Amy moved to Seattle from Charlotte, where she worked as a reporter and web producer for The Charlotte Observer. Since arriving in Seattle, Amy has immersed herself in digital media and online journalism. She’s interned with Serra Media, where she’s gained valuable experience building and managing hyperlocal online communities. And she’s focused on social media strategy and multimedia storytelling in the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington. Now Amy plans to apply this experience and knowledge to her new job at MSN. In Amy’s new role, she’ll help produce the MSN.com home page.

“In the four short years since I graduated from J-school, so much has changed,” Rainey said. “And I’d say it’s changed for the better. Journalists can no longer maintain a ‘we know best’ attitude and talk (down) to our readers. Instead, we are now members of a collective group that is gathering, sharing and participating in the conversation surrounding news.

“As I pursue a future in digital media and online journalism, there is no other place I’d rather be. I’ve learned a lot just by being in Seattle. This city is such a creative hub full of entrepreneurial experiments and innovative startups like Serra Media.”

It has been a privilege to work with Amy and we wish her the best. MSN made a smart hire.

- Mark Briggs

Hyperlocal comes into focus for Serra Media intern

By Jay Huerbin

At the halfway point of both my time with Serra Media and my final semester at the University of Pittsburgh, I can look back — and ahead — on my internship and say that it’s been both useful and a learning experience.

I’ve never visited the northwest, nor had I heard of hyperlocal news before starting with Serra Media. But by the second week of my internship, I felt like I’d been there a thousand times and started to understand what is so special about hyperlocal news.

I’ve worked extensively with two of Serra Media’s Newsgarden sites — one a small city paper and the other still growing — so far this semester.

With the Olympian’s site, I felt like I was walking into an already solid community. The news is constant and always evolving. And because Olympia is at the heart of Washington government, politics are what define the area. They’re the most popular topics and what power conversation.

But the Union-Bulletin’s Newsgarden was different. It’s a smaller newspaper in a smaller town and implements a paywall, but that doesn’t make their website any less important. This is the site with the most to do. But with that comes the potential. While still growing and gaining an audience, it’s important to keep the site fresh with different and new material to engage the reader.

It’s two different areas with two different sites. But the audience is still the same, in that they are there to learn about their community, and they want to be engaged. Despite the differences, both of these Newsgardens could learn from each other.

In Walla Walla, community involvement and town meetings are important to keeping the area connected. In Olympia, knowing what happens with their tax dollars is always the hot topic. Perhaps more of the other is just what one needs to keep strong when it comes to hyperlocal news.

Now, Serra Media has launched another Newsgarden, this one in Kent, and just like the Olympian and News-Bulletin, the Reporter will become part of the local community.

Now, just like in Olympia and Walla Walla, it’s time for the Reporter to find its niche.

Jay Huerbin, a journalism major at the University of Pittsburgh, is interning this semester at Serra Media. You can read more from Jay on his blog and follow him at @jayhuerbin.

Wash. newspaper adds paywall ’success’ to website redesign

By Jay Huerbin

A little more than a year ago, the main newspaper for the Walla Walla Valley in Washington state, the Union-Bulletin, considered a major change in its website design. A controversial part of that redesign involved creating a paywall — giving full access to stories only if you were a paying subscriber.

But for a small-market newspaper, the decision might be the right one.

“We were looking for a way to increase online revenue and at the same time decrease the drop in circulation,” said Carlos Virgen, the Union-Bulletin’s online services manager. “Our attempts at increasing online revenue solely through advertising have been very slow. And as a small operation, we felt we’d be in a position to switch strategies if we discovered that the payment system wasn’t working.”

The Union-Bulletin, which publishes six days a week and has a circulation around 16,000, doesn’t look like it will change its online revenue strategy any time soon. Virgen said that the paper was in discussions with publishers at Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Lewiston Tribune and the Post Register about implementing a payment plan.

The site’s redesign coincided with implementing a paywall.

“As far as I know, we did not hear any concerns from local business regarding our change in strategy,” Virgen said about business relationships with the paper. “In fact, due to our payment and registration system, we now have some updated demographic information that we can share with advertisers. And the new site layout adds considerable value to some of our ads.”

That’s good news for businesses, but finding an audience that is willing to pay — even at roughly half the price of a print subscription — for online content. Still, the Union-Bulletin hasn’t seen much backfire from the paywall.

“It has affected our traffic less than I expected,” Virgen said. “Compared to the same time last year, we have seen some drop overall, but I think our traffic last year was a bit inflated because of some extreme winter weather that the area experienced.”

Virgen also noted recent success in that the Union-Bulletin has matched year’s traffic over the last few days, something “that bodes well for us.”

And after roughly a year, Virgen, who’s been with the Union-Bulletin since September 2006, said that he “would cautiously say it has been a success.”

“We had an idea on what to expect for online-only and overall registered users based on data from some of the newspapers we consulted with,” he said. “And the negative feedback from the community has been minimal.”

Part of the positive feedback from Union-Bulletin readers comes as a result of the coverage that no other publication is doing in the Valley. Virgen said that the “big newspaper,” the Tri-City Herald, occasionally reports on the Walla Walla community, but the Union-Bulletin
provides daily and more in-depth coverage.

“We definitely feel that there is no one reporting on the Walla Walla Valley as well or as comprehensively as we are,” Virgen said. “Whereas the Tri-City Herald often files stories based on press releases or on U-B stories, we actually have reporters out in the community, which I think makes a big difference in the minds of our readers. So, we felt that the community greatly values our journalism and would find the nominal fee acceptable.”

But with the increasing presence of citizen journalism and new media strategies such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook, the Union-Bulletin is monitoring and working to improve its online reporting. It recently launched Serra Media’s Newsgarden platform as another weapon in the fight for audience.

“I am aware that there is more coverage of the community outside of what we do,” Virgen said. “More so than when I first started, so it is definitely something I keep my on.”

The Union-Bulletin still offers free content on their website like blogs, video and special features. For more information on the newspaper’s relaunch, visit the Union-Bulletin’s website.

Jay Huerbin is a journalism major at the University of Pittsburgh and intern at Serra Media. You can read more from Jay on his blog and follow him at @jayhuerbin.

BargainBabeLA showcases power of mapping for local audience

The BargainBabe, Julia Scott, recommended limiting the scope of your site if you are publishing a local content destination. And she is using the collaborative mapping platform developed by Serra Media to do that geographically on her site BargainBabeLA.com.

Scott presented this morning at the Interactive Local Media conference in Los Angeles during a session called “Mapping Out Local Revenue and Services.”

In addition to previewing a new design to the TownLuxe UI that we’ll be launching soon, Scott offered suggestions for growing an active user community (instead of a passive one). She says active users help spread the word and she aims for the 80/20 rule where 20% of users do 80% of the sharing/promotion.

During the Q&A, Scott previewed other technology that we’ll be building out for BargainBabeLA in the near future, including the integration of social media posts by geography and mobile applications for users to view and contribute deals by location.

It has been six months since we launched BargainBabeLA and it continues to show promise. Geoff Donaker, COO of Yelp, told the conference yesterday how it took 18 months for Yelp to gain critical mass in its first location (San Francisco). It’s exciting to think about where Scott and BargainBabe will be a year from now.

Is there still a massive opportunity in local online?

Several hundred people at a Hyatt in LA think so.

And if you follow the local online business segment at all, there are a couple of bedrock beliefs that power much of the discussions in this space:

1. There is still tons of opportunity to connect local businesses to local consumers through digital publishing and marketing

2. Google is the 10,000-pound gorilla and you’re probably better see it as a partner, not a competitor, if you want to have a future

I’m at the Interactive Local Media conference in Los Angeles through Friday, analyzing the state of local business marketing online. (One of Serra Media’s partners, Julia Scott of BargainBabeLA.com, will be presenting on Friday, too.)

I’ll be posting updates to Twitter and you can find the conference stream by searching the hashtag #ILM09. If the morning sessions are any indication, there will be loads of good information presented here.

Already this morning, we heard about data that says that still only 42% of local businesses have a website, only 7% advertise online and only 14% have claimed their free profile page on Google. Clearly, there is opportunity here to connect buyers and sellers online. (And don’t even get us started on mobile.)

A number of companies are raising capital and funding business models to try to crack this nut. I’ll be looking for a few of the more interesting ones to profile here. On the radar from this morning are Kenshoo and Palore.

Kenshoo’s CEO asked for a show of hands this morning on how many people had heard of his company. A small smattering of hands went up. Which begs the 64,000 question: if Google can only get 14% of local businesses to interact with it for free, how will these new-age companies break through?

- Mark Briggs

Sacramento Press launches local ad network

Expect to see more of this in the coming months: indepdent local news and information sites banding together to form a local/regional advertising network.

The Sacramento Press today announced the most recent version, called SLOAN for Sacramento Local Online Ad Network. It’s an ambitious effort, which should be no surprise coming from a start-up news site that has made a lot of progress in a relatively short time. The site counts some 700 contributors to its news machine and will soon have 18 partners to leverage when selling ads.

“We’ve been working really hard on this,” Ben Ilfeld, co-founder and COO, told me last week. “Hyperlocal ad networks have been talked about at conferences, and in the blogosphere, for some time. We wanted to tap into advertisers like auto dealers or Indian casinos and having a network will make that easier.

“Our goal to support people doing interesting and good hyperlocal journalism.”

Upon launch (in mid-January) SLOAN will include The Rancho Cordova Post, Gold River Online, Elk Grove Online, SacMix, The Sac Rag, MyFolsom.com and The Tomato Pages Network.

The SacPress staff will be the only ones selling into the network and Adify will supply the technology, so each will take cut of the action. But Ilfeld said publishers in the network will still receive 60% of the revenue, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me.

“We want to put together enough unique users to challenge the other news outlets, and eventually, maybe even the (Sacramento) Bee,” Ilfeld added.

- Mark Briggs