| ByKhari Williams
A southwest Florida newspaper is addingreaders 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 stateor regional coverage, have embraced a “local-local” philosophy of saturating neighborhoods with coverage of everyday happenings andcontinuously posting local reports on News-Press.com. The result hasbeen a spike in readership online and new revenue opportunitiesas advertisers take note, said Mackenzie Warren, News-Press managing editor for information distribution, during hissession titled “Going Hyper-local” on April 19 at the ACESconference in Miami.
Central to the hyper-local movement is a team of mojos,or mobile journalists, who are much more likely to writeabout a new hot dog stand than they are to cover a schoolboard 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 saysis “road-tested and scoliosis-approved,” and their tools include their choiceof one of two types of laptop computer with a built-in audio recording device, a wireless access point, Nikon Coolpix camera with videoability, MP3 recorder and cell phone. Mojos don’t havea desk or landline in the newsroom, though, as they’re expectedto spend their time in their communities mining stories.
“We don’t want to see you in this office unless you’recoming in to visit with an editor or you’re turning somethingin,” Warren said.
Mojos have the ability to post their reports online immediatelyafter writing, bypassing the copy desk and providing onNews-Press.com the constant updates that readers expect frommost major news organizations.
“The same level of service and immediacy that they canexpect 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 potentialfor errors in hyper-local content, Warren said the rewardoutweighs 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 themicrosites have been enough to persuade the News-Press towork on giving copy editors more oversight of online content throughout thenews cycle, except for the Web site’s “dark” hours between2 and 4 a.m. (As if to illustrate the need for copy editingonline, Warren during his presentation pointed to an online headlinethat read “No heading” over a story on the Bonita Springs microsite.)
And the News-Press’ emphasis on local contenthasn’t been limited to the Web site. Warren pointed outthat 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 widelyread two-paragraph articles that mojos typically post online.
Lengthy takeouts, save for the occasional Sunday projectstory, 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 withinthe newsroom at first, but the popularity of hyper-localcontent speaks for itself, Warren said. He likens the shiftto local-local coverage to another sea change in the technological realm.
“If people at Kodak, if they wanted to have philosophicaldiscussions about the quality of digital vs. film, that’sfine,” 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. RETURN TOWWW.COPYDESK.ORG |
