Ft. Myers uses its mojo to power neighborhood microsites

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., is seeing positive results from a new approach to increase neighborhood coverage and online readership.

The Gannett Inc. Co.-owned newspaper (daily, 78,673; Sunday, 93,711) kicked off its mobile journalism or “mojo,” program in late 2005 after hearing from readers that they wanted more local coverage.

In response, The News-Press assigned reporters, armed with laptops, digital cameras and digital voice recorders to specific neighborhoods, from which they immediately post stories to the paper’s Web site as events dictate.

“People have always had an appetite for more local news and we wanted to get reporters out into the neighborhoods to do a deeper level of local coverage,” said Kate Marymont, executive editor and vice president of news at The News-Press. “We don’t have the space in a daily newspaper to cover the kind of detail that readers really want, so we thought let’s experiment with doing these neighborhood sites on our Web site and see if we can do it that way.”

Traffic soaring

Since launching the program, The News-Press has seen Web traffic grow, particularly from the nine neighborhood microsites, Marymont said.

“We have strong growth on our overall Web site, but these microsites are growing at three times the rate of our overall Web site,” Marymont said.

The paper has also been able to attract advertising onto each particular microsite.

“We have developed an advertising program that lets advertisers specifically market on these microsites so that they can target specific readers,” she said.

The News-Press has four dedicated mojo journalists and nine other reporters, from its weekly publication, that cover the neighborhood microsites.

Marymont said equipping a mojo varies from $1,000 to as much as $6,000, depending on the sophistication of the kit. The reporters are equipped with laptops, digital MP3 voice recorders and digital cameras and can transmit their stories and photos through a wireless connection from the field, using Saxotech Online software.

“The reporters who write for our Cape Coral weekly used to work all week long and produce a product used once a week,” Marymont said. “Now, as they get information, they put it online so that the Cape (Coral) microsite is getting populated with content every day and people can go and find out what’s happening in their neighborhood” as it happens.

Some of the news is important only to a specific neighborhood, such as traffic tie-ups and road closures.

“They’ll put a couple of paragraphs up when (a road) is opened up again,” information that is useful to readers, Marymont said.

Photos part of the mix

On some occasions, the mojos might post as many a dozen updates a day. And while news coverage is important, the microsites also focus on photo galleries.

“We also try to have a lot of photo galleries from the communities because people like to see what’s happening,” she said.

In addition to traffic news, some of the more popular stories on the sites include articles and pictures about new businesses and other economic updates.

Marymont said other newspapers looking to enhance their own neighborhood coverage have approached The News-Press about the mojo program.

“I have spoken to several national groups about mojos and have had several editors from other newspapers come here to observe the program,” Marymont said, adding that The News-Press will expand the program throughout 2007.

“By the end of 2007, all of our reporters and photographers will be converted to a mojo workflow,” she said. “It is unclear whether we will be expanding personnel but we will surely spread mojos and add microsites to new areas while trading off some other things that are lesser growth opportunities.”