Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 30 January 2008 at 08:00
Tags: Associated Northcliffe Digital, Hull Daily Mail, geotagging, hyperlocal
The Hull Daily Mail has launched an user-generated local web site that incorporates a number of social media features and could, if successful, be rolled out across Northcliffe’s regional newspapers.
The site, ThisisYourMail, combines functionality found on social bookmarking and social networking sites with mapping and geographically-localised of content.
Hull Daily Mail editor John Meehan told Press Gazette: “I wouldn’t describe it as citizen journalism or as social networking. There are elements of it but we needed another description and we have coined the phrase community conversation.”
Registered users of the site can select up to seven locations from a list of towns and other areas in the region, and can then submit text or pictures about those places. This section of the site, called YourPatch, will also be seeded with stories from the main Hull Daily Mail site, ThisisHullandEastRiding. The resulting selection of locally-relevant items will be displayed on a Google Map.
Most of the site, however, will consist exclusively of user-submitted content. In the “YourSay” open forum section on the site, users can add text or images and tag them with keywords.
Users can also form public groups with other users with similar interests (in a section called AllYours) or private groups with their that can only be accessed by invited friends or family members (YourFamily).
Throughout the sections, each submitted item has its own comment thread and a voting tool to allow users rate the quality of other users’ submissions.
Northcliffe Media content strategy director Robert Hardie said the site was the outcome of a new approach within the company to encourage local newspaper centres to innovate new digital products that could be rolled out across the group if they succeed locally
“We are more focused on empowering editors to develop ideas that, if they are successful, can be rolled out across Northcliffe,” Hardie told Press Gazette. “We can’t be afraid to fail.”
The site, which aims to attract around 12,000 monthly unique users in its first year, was built entirely by local developers and will be managed by Hull Daily Mail team, but has been designed so that it can be adapted to other sites in the future.
Because it is a completely open forum, ThisisYourMail will allow readers to raise local issues even where the paper has decided not to cover them, Hardie explained.
Often, he said, editors had found that the most commented-upon local issues in their communities were not the ones they had devoted the most coverage to.
“It represents a shift in the balance of power between the publisher and the reader,” he said.
