The Greensboro News & Record launched it’s newest online endeavour, the "Hometown Hub."  The first hub is for the Summerfield community (never been there, but it sounds nice) and here’s how John Robinson, the paper’s editor describes the effort:

Today, we introduce a Web site of news and information about
Summerfield, created by folks who live there. Community news editor
Betsi Robinson describes the mission of "Hometown Hubs: Summerfield" on
the front page of this section.

Hometown Hubs represents another step of turning the model of
newspaper publishing on its head. We will publish the citizen
journalism online first, and then move the most interesting content
into the newspaper.

We have done this with YourNews,
our online citizen journalism site, but Hometown Hubs is our first
effort at building a site around a real community. As Betsi notes, it
is the first of many. It continues our effort to build a virtual town
square, where you can share your news, your stories and your opinions
with others.

I like this idea for many reasons, but the most obvious is that it creates a community dialog with the newspaper.  Or put another way, it keeps the newspaper relevant to its readers, because what’s more relevant to a reader than what’s happening in her own back yard?

Another reason I like the Hometown Hub is that it seems to reinforce my perception that the News & Record has an idea of where it wants to go online.  John repeatedly communicates the newspaper’s goals for its online initiatives via his blog.  In fact in the post from which I got the above quote he also writes this:

"More online." That phrase has become as common in the newspaper as "Today’s forecast."

That’s purposeful. The Internet gives us new opportunities to reach
out to readers. Because it is limitless, we don’t have to worry about
space. Because it is interactive, we can talk with and listen to people
publicly and easily. Because it is not made of paper, we can produce
audio and video. Because it iss free, it is accessible.

Each of these characteristics helps us in our efforts to deliver
news and information, and to build more of a sense of community among
people in both the Triad and the world.

John and his folks "get it," that’s clear.  They are way ahead of most newspapers and small-city newspapers in particular.

In fact this is just another example of the N&R pulling away from my hometown paper, the Winston-Salem Journal, when it comes to the online realm.  The Journal already has a couple of "hometown" editions that it publishes in the newspaper on Thursdays.  One is the Clemmons Journal which also incorporates my town of Lewisville.  As you can see by clicking the link the Journal has a dedicated page on its site for the hometown edition, but it is merely a "re-print" of what appeared in the print edition.  Not real dynamic.

I can tell you for a fact that on Thursdays the first section of the paper I read is the Clemmons Journal.  It’s where I find out what the hot topics are at Town Hall, what’s happening in terms of development, when the new highway will (or won’t) be built.  It isn’t hard to imagine a "Hometown Hub" taking off for Clemmons, Kernersville, Ardmore and other sections of Winston-Salem and the other Western NC communities that the Journal serves.

But why should the Journal care?  They still make most of their money on the print edition: in its latest financial report the Journal’s parent company, Media General, said that the Journal had revenue of $4,078,000 in August and $3,263,000 of that came from advertising.  That’s 80% of the revenue, so it’s easy to say, "Ah well, the online stuff is nice, but it’s just a small piece."

On the other hand the same report shows that the Journal’s web traffic has  grown 32% compared to last August, and the corporation’s interactive media revenue has grown 52% over last August.  Now interactive media still only accounts for about 1.25% of Media General’s overall revenue compared to 50% for publishing, but publishing’s growth was minimal at 1.1%.  So you don’t need to be a real business heavyweight to see things trending towards an increased contribution from their online properties.

And as someone who sells advertising I can tell you that a focused community site would be an easy sell to local retailers, and retail advertising is exactly where newspapers are seeing a decline in their print editions. I wonder if the powers-that-be at the Journal have been paying attention to the recent developments in advertising;  do they realize that online advertising is where the growth is?

And one last point: the News & Record is experimenting at a time when it is cheap to do so.  They do have some start-up online competitors like Greensboro101.com, and the local version of CraigsList, but because they entered the game early they aren’t playing catch up.  They are also making their mistakes while their readership is still relatively small, which means that they will be ready to serve all those new online advertisers as the online readership grows.

The Journal?  They’re sitting on the sidelines and are ripe for a start-up to shake them up.  Things will only get harder and more expensive with time, and they’re missing a golden opportunity to really exploit their local news monopoly.  Of course they still have time, but if they wait much longer they could end up playing an expensive game of catch-up.