Snapshot: The Florida Times-Union's MyClaySun

Snapshots from the Edge: A look at new ideas in online newspaper publishing
By Beth Lawton

Morris Communications has proven that a hyper-local, Web-first community publication can increase both audience and advertising with Bluffton Today. Now, the company is trying for a repeat in Jacksonville, Fla.

The Clay County Line was a long-running, Wednesday and Sunday-only broadsheet publication that was inserted into the Florida Times-Union daily newspaper. In early 2007, the Times-Union replaced The Clay County Line with a new, community-focused Web site and companion print publication called My Clay Sun covering Clay County, a fast-growing area just southwest of Jacksonville. ^[1]

My Clay Sun is a tabloid published Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It is distributed free via news racks throughout Clay County and as an insert in the daily paper for area subscribers.

The newspaper's staff in Clay County already had local contacts and familiarity with the area, which helped a good deal in the planning and launch of the new product. "It was nice because we already had an existing publication so we weren't starting from scratch," said T.J. Weyer, former new media director at the Florida Times-Union.*

Steve Yelvington**, media strategist for Morris DigitalWorks (a division of Morris Communications), said the new product was designed to be "more driven by what … people are more interested in with their personal lives."

Some of the print content from My Clay Sun is driven through the Web site. According to a January article in the Times-Union announcing the My Clay Sun launch, the Web site was designed to "do more than offer the same content as the printed edition, according to those behind its launch. It will also give readers a chance to talk about what's going on around them in blogs and other formats."

Weyer said the Web site is "by far here in Jacksonville the closest I've seen to a community-first oriented site. We don't even put every news story up, so the focus of it is blogs and photos and events."

Editors and other staffers at the Times-Union brainstormed and planned for about a year before launching the new product. The development process included looking at other products, primarily Morris' Bluffton Today, a community Web site and companion daily print publication in South Carolina. Bluffton Today's goal is to foster community conversation and allows users to largely control the content. (For more on Bluffton Today, see NAA's Growing Audience report "Innovation in Action".)

"I think we learned several things," Yelvington said. "We learned that it is in fact possible to build a positive and productive community conversation – one that's not dominated by a few destructive players... We learned that it's possible to make the Web site a place where people come together and accomplish positive social goals."

There will be some experimentation in the coming months, Weyer said. Bluffton is a smaller community, and Bluffton Today comes out more frequently. Weyer said the staff in Florida is smaller than the staff in Bluffton, even though the coverage area is larger. "I think they're trying to feel their way to a combination of variables that will make it work," Yelvington said.

Bluffton, S.C. and Clay County, Fla. have some things in common, which made it easy to apply lessons-learned in the planning process. There are high levels of broadband penetration in both areas, Yelvington said. Both communities are growing, "so it has some of the same sets of issues and conflicts that a lot of other areas – but certainly Bluffton – has, with the tension between old-timers and newcomers," Yelvington said.

Clay County is growing more slowly than Bluffton, however, which presents the challenge of getting the word out about the new publication. "[Clay County residents] are more stable and have less of that networking urge, so the challenge to us is to get out in front of groups of people and tell our story," Yelvington said. "It's a marketing challenge."

Weyer said the hardest part the first few months of My Clay Sun's life will be keeping it fresh and getting the community engaged. He expressed mild concern about getting enough content to support the four days per week publication, even though the size of the paper has shrunk.

"If you can get in with enough [community groups] and let them use the site as a conduit to communicate with others and couple that with photos and events… this thing could grow to a point where there's an overload of information on the site. That, I think, is the biggest challenge there is," Weyer said.

Over time, Weyer said he will define success in terms of both traffic and engagement. "We measure unique visitors, page views, time spent and the number of visits," Weyer said. "If you keep an eye on all four of those things, it will give you a good barometer of whether you're growing or not. On the print side, readership, pick-up rates and [whether we're] becoming the dominant media source in Clay County."


^[1] Jacksonville, Fla. is the 13th fastest growing MSA according to citymayors.com/gratis/uscities_growth.html
* Since the launch of My Clay Sun, Weyer has left the Times-Union and now works for Network Communications Inc., a real estate advertising company.
** Yelvington is the winner of the 2007 Digital Edge Online Innovator award.

First Published:
April 1, 2007