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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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