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 »

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.

Newsgarden powers MyRenton site

The Renton Reporter unveiled the latest deployment of Newsgarden recently. Seth Long, director of new media for Sound Publishing (the paper’s owner), joined Reporter editor Dean Radford at a city sponsored meeting with almost three dozen neighborhood groups to announce the new site.

“We presented MyRenton at a quarterly meeting of Renton’s neighborhood program participants,” Long told me via email. “The neighborhood managers loved the idea of posting their own content on a community site and several are using it now. Maps are such easy interfaces for users to understand and that was apparent with our group as there were no questions about navigation or the interface.”

The Newsgarden platform is powering a larger strategy at the paper dubbed MyRenton where the newspaper site is also providing blogs for readers, in addition to the community mapping technology provided by Newsgarden.

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

Bargainbabe.com launches TownLuxe platform

Los Angeles-based shopping site Bargain Babe has partnered with Serra Media to be the first site to launch the innovative TownLuxe platform, which is being used to power the site’s new Bargain Babe LA section. “The most exciting part about BargainBabeLA.com is that EVERYONE can share a deal,” Bargain Babe’s Julia Scott wrote to announce the launch.

See the Bargain Babe site for more information:

Drumroll please….here comes BargainBabeLA.com!

Kitsap Sun launches Newsgarden

The Kitsap Sun, a Scripps-owned daily newspaper in Bremerton, Wash. launched Newsgarden to “help create a sense of shared community technology now allows.”

See their site for more information:

KitsapSun.com: Help Nurture Our Newsgarden