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 »

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.

My international hyperlocal experience

(NOTE: The following post was originally posted on Melissa Becker’s personal blog at http://melissabecker.wordpress.com.)

This was my last week on Serra Media’s Fall Internship Program. I joined that in the end of September - an opportunity to have an ‘international experience’ with a propose I’ve been working some years with and which became more popular recently: hyperlocal news.

In this program, we are four community cultivators – from Seattle (WA), Portland (OR), Los Angeles (CA) and, yes, Porto Alegre (RS), Brazil. The position’s goal: we should “grow a meaningful, constructive community of Web users through outreach, participation and creativity”.

I was curious about how is working with another audience, who has different culture and ways for accessing internet and digital tools. On my daily job, here in Brazil, I edit a supplement and a blog about the neighbourhood where I grow up. Everything could be so different from I’m used to do. I’ve never been in USA or Canada – for while -, but I’ve picked up news for four cities/regions in these countries for nine weeks.

Actually it isn’t so different. Hyperlocal news can be similar anywhere: weekend markets, traffic interruptions, festivals, city hall decisions, interesting people. Example: last Thursday, there’s a storm in Porto Alegre, and some bloggers sent me photos, published on Blog do ZH Zona Sul early afternoon. At night, I checked The Bellingham Herald’s Newsgarden and found out a report submitted by a user: That Blows, with photos of a Vintage Ford Truck crushed by a tree fall. Stormy weather caused damages in both cities.

As community cultivators, we identified who is blogging about that city and share their posts in Newsgarden – and, of course, I invited them to add more contributions there in the future. As here, sometimes people invited me to visit their places (“Oh, thanks, but I live out of the city…“).

Both cases, in Brazil and in US, one of the main challenges is the audience’s engagement. I haven’t created an amazing formule to this question during the internship – if someone has it, let me know (some tips in the post Social Tools and Hard Work Drive Local Audiences, Serra Media Blog) -, but I’m glad to finish the task with some result: the number of views increased in all these sites since this internship began. Now I can face another hyperlocal experience.

New report: How to build a user community online

It doesn’t matter how how big your audience is. It doesn’t matter how cool your technology is. It doesn’t matter how clean your design is. Building a sustainable, vibrant community of users who contribute to your content operation is no easy task.

But it’s worth the investment.

Serra Media’s software helps solve the technical challenge of building a community, but we also want to share our experience and our research on the human side. So we’re releasing the Audience Mobilization Guide that we’ve been sharing with our partners to anyone interested in specific, actionable ideas for launching, promoting and maintaining a community of contributors online.

Thanks to Amy Rainey for her efforts on this report, and the great learnings of previous projects led by Rich Gordon at Northwestern University, Mark Potts at Backfence and Dan Pacheco and all the innovation leaders at the Californian in Bakersfield.

[Click here to download the report]

- Mark Briggs

Redesigned Gazette site focuses on breaking news, unique local content

The Gazette launched a new Web site this summer after redesigning and rebuilding its online presence from scratch. The new site is a vital step toward becoming a digital-first news operation. Rather than serve as an online version of the printed Cedar Rapids, Iowa, newspaper, GazetteOnline.com will be its own entity. The Gazette kept the same URL, but revamped the site’s branding and marketing.

The goal is to make GazetteOnline the best source for Eastern Iowans to “keep up with their ever-changing world,” wrote Brand Editor Jason Kristufek on NewsTribe.us, a blog chronicling the Gazette’s redesign. The redesigned site will offer updated content every 15 minutes during peak news times – 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday – and use innovative tools to allow users to share, contribute and engage.

Content is king on the new site, and it will be a major factor that determines the site’s success. The site will provide people the immediate information they crave and a wealth of local knowledge and resources. Breaking news – weather, traffic and crime coverage, for example – has a prominent role on top of the home page. Live coverage, which is one of the fastest growing content areas, will also play a large role on the new site.

Additionally, GazetteOnline will focus on offering news and information that isn’t found anywhere else, such as photo galleries, videos, databases, archives, sports coverage and local news. The new GazetteOnline will provide contextual content experiences through links, aggregation, reverse syndication, user-generated items and other information that adds value to content. For example, GazetteOnline is using Block Talk, which is powered by Serra Media’s Newsgarden platform, to interact with users. Through the social-mapping platform, users can submit and share news, photos and videos.

Rather than use proprietary software, GazetteOnline opted to use the open-source Wordpress platform. Visually, the redesigned site offers its audience an improved user experience centered around news and information, and a streamlined navigation is a big part of that.

- Amy Rainey

BarbainBabeLA.com launch event unites frugally conscious shoppers

Bargain-hunters and recessionistas were out in full force at last weekend’s Frugal Festival, the launch event for BargainBabeLA.com.

Bargain Babe Julia Scott at Frugal Festival

Powered by Serra Media’s innovative Townluxe platform, BargainBabeLA.com offers people an outlet for finding and sharing deals in Los Angeles. The free frugality celebration also marked the six-month anniversary of BargainBabe.com, a site that helps you save money on everyday expenses.

Bargain Babe Julia Scott organized the event with the help of sponsors. Roughly 300 people came out to the festival in Van Nuys, where they swapped free items, shared money-saving tips and received free financial advice. About 100 attendees left with a free T-shirt or one of many raffle prizes, including $100 cash, a laptop and gift certificates.

Frugal Festival created a lot of buzz, including event coverage by the LA Times and LA Daily News. More than 200 people signed up for BargainBabe’s e-mail list. BargainBabeLA.com also saw a huge spike in traffic – with visits and page views more than doubling – the day after the event.

Volunteer Bobbi running a free swap - one of the most popular events at Frugal Fe$t!

“The event was a tremendous success in terms of gaining exposure for BargainBabeLA.com and celebrating the frugal community,” Scott said. “Long term, Frugal Festival has many intangible benefits, like word of mouth publicity. That guy who won the $100 bill is going to tell all his friends about it.”

Frugal Festival is a perfect example of the marketing and launch efforts that help create successful hyperlocal sites. Like Scott, managers of hyperlocal communities have to take on the role of marketing and evangelizing their brand. For more on attracting contributors to your hyperlocal site, click here.

- Amy Rainey

How to attract contributors

Your hyperlocal community site is nothing without involvement from your community. There are several steps you can take to engage your audience and encourage people to contribute to your site.

• Before you launch, be sure to seed the site with content so that new visitors get a good idea of what the site is about and have content to read.
• Reach out to community activists, local bloggers, Flickr enthusiasts and freelance writers. These people can help form a core of contributors.
• Meet personally with local officials and important community groups, but focus on selling your site to the individuals there.
• Host meetups and workshops where you can recruit contributors and teach people how to contribute to the site.
• Attend arts festivals, sports matches and other community events to promote the site.
• Hand out fliers at busy community spots, such as shopping malls and transit stops.
• Make it as easy as possible for people to contribute to the site. Allow people to register for the site at community events and to contribute via e-mail, text message, photos, videos, etc.

- Amy Rainey