"GOING HYPER-LOCAL"

Local news in overdrive

A Florida newspaper finds success by deploying an army of
"mobile journalists" to cover neighborhood happenings
for the Web and publishing all-local section fronts in print

Mackenzie Warren (Fort Myers News-Press) tells how papers can use mobile journalists to provide "hyper-local" coverage of community stories on the Web. (Photo by Khari Williams)

By Khari Williams

A southwest Florida newspaper is adding readers by working its “mojos.”

Managers at The (Fort Myers) News-Press, aware they cannot compete with the likes of the St. Petersburg Times or Miami Herald on state or regional coverage, have embraced a “local-local” philosophy of saturating neighborhoods with coverage of everyday happenings and continuously posting local reports on News-Press.com.

The result has been a spike in readership online and new revenue opportunities as advertisers take note, said Mackenzie Warren, News-Press managing editor for information distribution, during his session titled “Going Hyper-local” on April 19 at the ACES conference in Miami.

Central to the hyper-local movement is a team of mojos, or mobile journalists, who are much more likely to write about a new hot dog stand than they are to cover a school board meeting. The idea, Warren said, is to get at the issues that matter most to readers: how they spend their time and their money.

Of the paper’s 65 content-gatherers (reporters and photographers), 52 are full- or part-time mojos. They are equipped with $2,000 worth of equipment in a backpack that Warren says is “road-tested and scoliosis-approved,” and their tools include their choice of one of two types of laptop computer with a built-in audio recording device, a wireless access point, Nikon Coolpix camera with video ability, MP3 recorder and cell phone. Mojos don’t have a desk or landline in the newsroom, though, as they’re expected to spend their time in their communities mining stories.

“We don’t want to see you in this office unless you’re coming in to visit with an editor or you’re turning something in,” Warren said.

Mojos have the ability to post their reports online immediately after writing, bypassing the copy desk and providing on News-Press.com the constant updates that readers expect from most major news organizations.

“The same level of service and immediacy that they can expect from CNN or any number of international news organizations, they ought to be getting that same timeliness out of us,” Warren said.

Though the exclusion of copy editors increases the potential for errors in hyper-local content, Warren said the reward outweighs the risk of the occasional copy editing snafu: Traffic on the 11 ZIP code-specific microsites on News-Press.com where mojos post is rising at double the rate of the regular site, he said. However, the errors that have made it onto the microsites have been enough to persuade the News-Press to work on giving copy editors more oversight of online content throughout the news cycle, except for the Web site’s “dark” hours between 2 and 4 a.m. (As if to illustrate the need for copy editing online, Warren during his presentation pointed to an online headline that read “No heading” over a story on the Bonita Springs microsite.)

And the News-Press’ emphasis on local content hasn’t been limited to the Web site. Warren pointed out that the printed paper now features all-local front pages, with no national or international news before Page 4A, and has dramatically increased the number of news briefs, mirroring the widely read two-paragraph articles that mojos typically post online.

Lengthy takeouts, save for the occasional Sunday project story, no longer serve the company’s purposes, Warren said: “It’s not useful to our business objectives, we have found, so we’re not doing it anymore.”

The mojo movement was met with some resistance within the newsroom at first, but the popularity of hyper-local content speaks for itself, Warren said. He likens the shift to local-local coverage to another sea change in the technological realm.

“If people at Kodak, if they wanted to have philosophical discussions about the quality of digital vs. film, that’s fine,” Warren said. “But the world is wanting to buy digital, so that’s pretty much the same area that we find ourselves in.”


Khari Williams a copy editor at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

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