The Washington Post Co. today is launching LoudounExtra.com, an aggressive online push into hyperlocal journalism, combining traditional reporters and photographers with bloggers, videographers and extensive databases on schools, businesses and churches.
If the project is successful, The Post Co. plans to build similar sites for the rest of Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District. The project is part of The Washington Post's strategy to dominate local news and advertising and to enhance its relevance as an information provider.
The Web site represents a departure from how The Post and other big metropolitan dailies have covered local communities. Instead of focusing on major events, LoudounExtra will attempt to provide a comprehensive look at local news, from church schedules to high school sporting events to restaurant hours and menus. The effort highlights a problem of major newspapers in the Internet age: the need to balance national reporting with service to Web-savvy local readers.
Like many newspapers, The Post is losing readers and advertisers to the Internet and other media. Average daily circulation of The Post has dropped from its high of 832,232 in 1993 to 663,900 now. First-quarter print advertising revenue at The Post was down 16 percent in 2007 from the comparable period last year. Meanwhile, traffic and ad revenue at Washingtonpost.com have been climbing.
The LoudounExtra is the most recent, and possibly most ambitious, example of a major metro daily newspaper altering century-old game plans and adopting tactics that might, in the past, have seemed more suited to community newspapers.
Several MediaNews Group papers, such as the Denver Post, have rolled out Your Hub, which lets residents of suburban communities post blog entries and photos of local events. Hyperlocal projects of one stripe or another are underway at the Chicago Tribune, the Bakersfield Californian and other papers.
Although MediaNews Group says Your Hub has added significant revenue, other efforts have been less successful. The independent Backfence launched in 2005 as a site allowing residents of local communities, including Bethesda, Arlington and Reston, to post hyperlocal blogs and photos. It shut down this month after it failed to attract audience or advertisers.
Washingtonpost.com publisher Caroline Little said LoudounExtra.com takes a different approach to hyperlocal news. "I think that blogging is great, but blogging alone is not a be-all and end-all to drive traffic," Little said. "Useful information and database information are very important."
Following Others' Leads
Over the past several months, the six-person staff (and one intern) of LoudounExtra has assembled a restaurant guide by asking each of the county's restaurants to answer questions about their operation, contacted more than 130 houses of worship to find service schedules (and offered to upload podcasts of their sermons onto the Loudoun site), asked all county high school principals about their curriculums, shot panoramic photos of each school and collected statistics on each high school football player, among other data-collection tasks.
The information will be searchable and deliverable on a number of platforms, meaning users will be able to download the site's restaurant guide onto their iPods and use their cellphones to find restaurants open late at night.
In addition, the site will be filled with multiple news reports each day from The Post's Loudoun County reporters, who will file stories that may never be published in the newspaper.
The site's staff will make a round of cop calls each morning, listing incidents that happened overnight, even down to the level of "mailboxes being knocked down," said Rob Curley, LoudounExtra co-developer and a self-described "Internet nerd" who was hired by The Post last year after developing hyperlocal sites for the Naples (Fla.) Daily News and Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World & News.
Curley's revamping of the Lawrence site gained national attention because of the audience it attracted. In 2000 -- before remaking its site -- the Lawrence paper got 14 million page views, said Ralph Gage, chief operating officer of the World Co., which owns the paper. In 2006, that number had grown to 247 million, and the site booked about $2 million in revenue. The population of Lawrence is about 80,000, and the Journal's circulation is 20,000.
Page views at the Naples Web site are up 17 percent in the first six months of this year compared with 2006, when the site was revamped, said editor Phil Lewis, with unique monthly users up 26 percent. The Web site is responsible for more than 10 percent revenue, Lewis said, which is above the industry average.
The question has always been whether a major metropolitan newspaper can successfully run a hyperlocal site like this, and how both local and national advertisers will react.
Little said she thinks ad space on LoudounExtra will be purchased by smaller advertisers in the county, as well as national and regional advertisers that want to reach a particular Zip code within Loudoun County.
The Database Model
Key to the hyperlocal strategy of The Post and many other papers are searchable databases.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that they attract considerable viewers. In December, Gannett Co.'s Asbury Park (N.J.) Press dumped three huge public-record databases onto its Web site: local property sales and ownership, and state employees' salaries. By May, the paper had added searchable databases for local crime, school test scores, state deaths and public school employees.
In December, the paper's Web site recorded 1.5 million page views. By May, the site was averaging more than 5 million page views per month, according to data from a Newspaper Association of America study, with a high of more than 9 million page views in April.
But the LoudounExtra faces substantial competition. There are five weekly newspapers in the county. The Loudoun Times Mirror-- recently launched its first hyperlocal site in anticipation of The Post's site. In addition, the county has numerous subdivision listservs and non-newspaper Web sites, such as SouthRiding, that provide news and information on a granular level, as LoudounExtra will try to do.
"I am impressed the folks at The Post are taking a stab at our trade," said Peter Arundel, president of Times Community Papers. "But in some sense, they are late to the party. This is our turf, our skill set."
The revamped Times Mirror site will be filled with user photos and the filings of unpaid "citizen journalists" who will be vetted by Times Mirror editors, rather than the extensive databases and video found on the LoudounExtra. The Times papers plan to roll out other expanded hyperlocal Web sites across Northern Virginia in coming months.
Little said The Post Co. is in hyperlocal for the long haul. "If Loudoun totally flops, I would not walk away from this based on that," she added. "We need to try doing this in some different areas."
