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Hyperlocal Coverage
SWAT team, being a life-long resident
of rural Loudoun, as well as elaborate
pieces featuring photos from nearly
every high school prom in the county
and even local weddings.
There are not many journalists who
understand what Washington Post journalism
and 20,000-circulation newspaper
journalism tastes like. Snead does,
and he shows this sensibility while
using several multimedia tools from
his storytelling tool belt. But not all
of the multimedia on the site comes
from journalists. In some cases, video
arrives directly from one of the many
Webcams we have positioned near
Loudoun highways.
Evergreen content: Put together once
and given some rare care and feeding,
this content can basically last forever.
Our site has big sections on the history
of Loudoun, a moving-in guide for
new residents, and a “Loudoun 101”
overview. These sections also related to
editorial topics. For example, there is
a massive guide to AOL with a detailed
financial snapshot of the company dating
back to 1992, lots of multimedia
(including 360-degree panoramic photos
of the AOL campus in Loudoun),
and stories about the company—and its
predecessors—dating back to 1989. A
similar section exists for Dulles Airport,
including hundreds of Post stories gathered
since 1957. (Four people spent
a week copying, pasting and in many
cases typing in stories dating back to
when the idea for “Chantilly Airport”
was first conceived.) There’s a virtual
tour inside and outside the airport and
a gallery of historic and current photos,
links to flight information, coverage of
the Metrorail extension to Dulles, and
a traveler’s guide to the airport. This
means that when these topics become
headline news, these huge sections exist
to give our readers more perspective
and information.
Platform-independent delivery: We
want our site’s content to work in any
format—video, text, audio—and on
every site and device our readers might
use, whether it be on mobile phones,
iPods, MP3 players, game consoles,
iGoogle, MyYahoo, Facebook, or on a
desktop through customized widgets.
Schedules can be downloaded to
Microsoft Office calendar or iPhones.
And we’ve spent lots of time building
mobile versions of our site with the
latest news, movie listings, calendar
information, or info on where to get
dinner. We also do a lot with text messaging
to mobile phones. We send game
updates for local high school football
games or reminders to people that they
wanted to attend an event listed in our
calendar. We often joke that if we could
figure out how to beam content directly
to your brain, we would.
Audience dialogue/community publishing:
On nearly every page of the
site, readers can comment. Without
going into a ton of detail on how the
proprietary system was built, it recognizes
a registered washingtonpost.
com reader, then takes it from there.
There are a lot of blogs, anchored by
a staff-written blog called Living In
LoCo, which is Tammi Marcoullier’s
take—and she seems to know everyone
and everything—on interesting things
in Loudoun County. Our audience
loves her, easily making her blog the
most-read thing on our site nearly
every day. Because she is a well-connected
former AOL employee, she’s
even broken some pretty big news on
her blog. When AOL announced that
it would lay off 2,000 employees, the
e-mail sent to employees from CEO
Randy Falco was first posted on her
blog; the breaking news story on the
home page of washingtonpost.com
linked to Tammi’s blog.
The Linked Up in Loudoun blog is
a continuously updated look at interesting
items published on other sites
by newspapers, news organizations,
local homeowners associations, area
volunteer fire departments, other bloggers
in the region, and any other sites
that discuss noteworthy happenings
in Loudoun. The site also has a fairly
lengthy local blog directory, and we do
lots of live chats with community leaders,
such as with the superintendent
of schools or with local candidates.
We’ve been blown away by the quantity
and quality of the questions that come
through those chats.
One of the custom pieces of software
that we’ve worked on the most
is our community-publishing tool
that integrates content from YouTube,
Flickr and Facebook. Though lots of
other newspaper sites have their own
community-publishing tools, as we
did when our team was at the Naples
(Fla.) Daily News, on LoudounExtra.
com we decided to go a much different
route—this time building a site that
works the way the Internet really works,
instead of how many news organizations
wished the Internet worked.
Turns out that when people have
shot great photos or video, they are
much more likely to share those
through sites like YouTube, Flickr and
Facebook. So we’ve built software that
allows us to get local content from
those sites and move it to ours. You-
Tube, Flickr and Facebook allow this;
they even encourage it.
Using these strategies, we operate
LoudounExtra.com, a constantly
changing news site that was designed
so its day-to-day workflow can be maintained
by essentially one highly trained
(and very motivated) editor. Even so,
there will be times when we dip into
our team’s intern pool for help, such
as covering high school football games
or on Election Night.
Will The Washington Post’s hyperlocal
strategy work We just don’t
know, but that does not mean we
are not going to try. The early results
have been promising, as traffic and
revenue numbers have exceeded our
early projections and content initially
created for the Web site continues to
find itself more and more in the print
product. Now we’ve started work on
other regional hyperlocal sites to be
released soon by The Washington Post
and washingtonpost.com.
By any measure, we believe LoudounExtra.com—at
least in these early
stages—has been a success. And in a
lot of ways, it seems a whole lot like
how journalism felt to me when I was
just a kid in Osage City.
Rob Curley leads the product development
team at Washingtonpost.-
Newsweek Interactive.
56 Nieman Reports / Winter 2007