Local advertisers, readers benefit from citizen journalists

How more than 3,000 civilian journalists took command of Het Belang van Limberg’s hyperlocal weekend supplement. And how we made money from it.

On March 1, 2011, Het Belang van Limburg launched its hyperlocal project. Het Belang van Limburg (with an 85% market share and 100,000 daily net sales) is by far the newspaper of choice for the inhabitants of Flanders’s most eastern province. 

The project consists of 48 Web sites, one for each community. The innovative part of the concept is that the inhabitants of the communities can send in their own news stories. The articles are not only published on the Web site but also in an extra weekend supplement. 

As of October, 35 of the 48 communities are online and already 3,250 people have registered to be an active civil journalist, or “news hunter,” as they are called in the newspaper. Every weekend supplement has 20 pages, and we publish 10 different editions. Each edition serves a cluster of 100,000 people. Added up, that means that one million people can become a “news hunter.”

Remarkably, our readers write almost 80% of the content in the weekend supplements. And the local advertisers love it, as we had hoped they would. By keeping the ad rates low and placing the ads next to the local content of their community, the advertisers can communicate directly with their potential customers.  

The commercial possibilities were one of the reasons for launching the project. New advertisers, for whom the daily newspaper was too expensive, are now queuing up to appear in their local edition.

But the main reason for going hyperlocal was the connection with our readers. We want to bind them to our brand and educate them to use all our media — not only the printed daily, but also our Web sites and social media.

People participate in this effort for different reasons:

• Out of personal interest. They just love to write. They know what is going on in their community and like to share it. These are the people who see a fire engine pass, jump in their car, take a picture of the blaze, and send it in.
   
• They want to connect with their neighbours. They are searching for their lost pet, they want to organise a street barbecue, or they want to improve the traffic situation in their community. By posting an article, they give their community a voice or create a call to action.
   
• They want to promote their association or sports club.

A team of professional journalists, recruited from the current newsroom, edits and/or checks every article that is sent in by citizen journalists. 

The first six months were a great success with more than 3,000 citizen journalists writing for us and thousands of articles published. Even our communication is self-funding. We distribute a door-to-door magazine in every community to explain the project. The local commerce advertises in it, so we can keep the cost very low. And on the cover of the magazines? Local people of course. 

What challenges do we face?

• How to generate enough money with low rate ads. You can’t sell an ad for €100 and spend €150 on its layout. The cost structure has to be lenient, which is not always easy for a big company. We urge advertisers to work through a customer portal.
   
• How to generate enough relevant content. Our goal is to motivate at least 25% of all inhabitants of a community to visit the Web site once a week. Therefore, the news has to be interesting and socially relevant enough to keep them coming back. It has to go further than runaway dogs and school trips. By coaching the civil journalists, we try to achieve this goal.
   
• How to organize the newsroom. The mere fact of using user-generated content comes as a shock to most journalists in the newsroom. On top of that, we want them to work with that content, to publish it immediately on the Web site, to elaborate on it. This demands an entirely new point of view on news handling.

But we’re not done yet. Our plans for 2012 include:

• Launching a national and regional marketing campaign.
   
• Focusing on profiling and coaching the citizen journalists.
   
• Raising ad rates.
   
• Developing mobile applications.
   
• Recruiting extra citizen journalists. Our goal is to have 8,000 co-creators of content — to have eyes and ears in every district, on every street in our province.
   

Source: http://www.inma.org/article/index.cfm/49142-local-advertisers-readers-benefit-from-citizen-journalists