Hyperlocal News Sites Targeting Central Mass.
With print newspapers looking more and more like a relic of a previous age and the news industry struggling to find a way to make money online, a local startup is jumping into the world of online news with both feet.
CentralMassNews.com, which started last March with GraftonTimes.com, a “hyperlocal” news site covering the town of Grafton, now has nine such online media sites. And publisher Jack Schofield said by the end of the year he hopes to be running 10 or 11 sites, each covering a tiny piece of the Greater Worcester area.
“We don’t want to be a weekly, we don’t want to be like the Telegram,” he said, referring to the region’s largest daily newspaper, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. “We want to be something completely different.”
Same, But Different
The CentralMassNews.com sites cover local events and sports, much like traditional print weeklies, but they are updated daily.
Schofield said his three established sites got 10,466 unique visitors and 194,252 pageviews in December, with more than half of the traffic going to the Grafton site. Telegram.com, by contrast, has about 9 million pageviews per month.
Schofield said NorthbridgeTimes.com has been adding readers slowly and TheDailyMillbury.com started more recently but has seen its readership grow fast. The company has also launched sites covering Shrewsbury, Leicester, Auburn, Holden, Northborough and Westborough.
With the Telegram cutting back its coverage of local communities, Schofield said the online papers fill a sizeable gap, and residents are eager to see them show up. At one point, he said, the company was considering starting a new site for Sutton but decided to hold off, and people from the small town complained. He said one message he received concerning the decision was signed “sad in Sutton.”
But many in the news industry question whether online readership can translate into advertising dollars.
“As near as I can see, nobody yet has been able to really find that magic key that unlocks the online revenue,” said Walter Bird, executive editor at the Stonebridge Press in Southbridge, which publishes several weekly papers and one daily in Central Massachusetts. All the Stonebridge Press papers are available online as well as in print.
In general, ads in online newspapers are far cheaper than their print equivalents. An analysis published in the Columbia Journalism Review in August suggests that print newspapers make about $450 in advertising revenue per reader while their online editions make just $46 per reader.
But CentralMassNews.com is finding favor at least with some advertisers. Randy Leonard, president of Ultimate Flooring & Design Center Inc., said the ads he’s run in the online papers have been his most effective marketing since he started the business a year and a half ago.
“I think it was great,” Leonard said. “It really turned things around for me.”
Print advertising has traditionally been significantly more expensive than ads in papers’ online editions, but Mary Novick, marketing coordinator with Gaudette Insurance Agency in Whitinsville, said she’s actually willing to pay a bit more to run ads on CentralMassNews.com.
That’s because the web site ads show up on multiple pages within the web sites and run alongside different stories day after day.
“It’s thousands and thousands of impressions,” she said. With print publications, she said, “Someone gets that paper and they read it through once and it’s one impression.”
Beyond The Page
A handful of daily papers around the country have reduced or eliminated their print operations and shifted their focus to their web sites. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer became an online-only paper last spring, but only by massively reducing its staff and its original reporting.
CentralMassNews.com also keeps its costs relatively low. It started with just two employees and now has about 10, including two salespeople, Schofield said. Reporters work mostly from home and typically are only on the clock 20 to 30 hours a week. Schofield said the company looks for reporters who are already part of the community they report on and know it well. In fact, he said, starting a new site is contingent on finding the right writer. He said the company put off a move into Westborough because it hasn’t found a locally connected reporter.
The company’s web sites are far from the only online sources of local news in the area.
Aside from the Stonebridge network and the web sites of the local dailies, New York-based Gatehouse Media runs 29 Central Massachusetts news sites as part of its 159-site “Wicked Local” network. The sites feature stories from Gatehouse’s daily and weekly papers.
And a new player, Patch.com (see related sidebar), is set to enter the Boston and MetroWest markets.
Online Only
As it continues to expand, Schofield said, CentralMassNews.com will focus on markets around Worcester, and perhaps in the city itself. He said it might try creating sites for specific neighborhoods.
One option the company isn’t looking at is adding a print publication. Schofield said he’s gotten the suggestion of adding a paper product to complement the site but decided against it.
“I just don’t see any point in adding all the overhead,” he said. “I personally don’t see newspapers lasting a heck of a lot longer.”
But Bird said he thinks there is still a significant market for print newspapers, particularly among older adults.
“I think there’s a tendency for people to forget that there’s other people alive rather than just 18 to 34,” he said. “I’m far from being elderly, and I was raised on newspapers.”
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments