New German regional newspaper site is well worth watching

Posted by Martin Stabe on 28 October 2007 at 08:00
Tags: Germany, geotagging, localisation, personalisation, regional, tagging

A much-hyped, much-anticipated and much-delayed, very “Web 2.0″ regional newspaper portal is finally set to launch late this evening in Germany.

While many regional publishers are pulling away from regional portals in favour of sites using established newspaper titles, the Essen-based WAZ newspaper group is going the other way, creating a new brand for its new portal. Der Westen (”The West”) will take material from the newsrooms of the groups from the group’s five regional papers in the western Ruhr region, including the eponymous flagship Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.

But brand strategy isn’t the main reason all eyes in Germany’s online media are on Essen. The site was built from the ground up and promises many several Web 2.0-inspired technical innovations, notably an emphasis on geotagging news content, a new tag-based search tool and online community-building features, including blogs and social network-style user profiles.

Last summer, the WAZ group hired blogger Katharina Borchert to head the ambitious project, which, if it works as advertised, could well become part of the small circuit of European online news operations that newspaper executives troop to in search of best practice.

The backend of the content management system that the site uses,Handelsblatt’s media blogger Thomas Knüwer reports after a recent visit to the site’s brand-new newsroom, is clean and reminiscent of blogging tools — 810 of the group’s print journalists have been trained to use it. The front end is cleanly-designed as well, judging by screenshots that have appeared in German media (Spiegel Online has a slideshow).

And cross-media integration is also a key part of the launch — with just 20 dedicated staff for the site, the bulk of the news will have to come from journalists in the existing print newsrooms. There are already reports of mutterings about the extra work involved — but in a podcast interview with Knüwer of Handelsblatt, Bochert argued that it was no longer sustainable to build newspaper web sites around a specialist online journalist in each newsroom, because this allows others in the newsroom to abdicate responsibility for the online medium.

Geotagging is likely to become a hot topic for regional news sites in Britain as well. Archant revealed in May that it plans to use geotagging technology in the new sites that will be piltoted later this year ahead of a rollout in 2008.