Rob Curley’s team at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive today launched its first community site, LoudounExtra.com. Outside of the semi-weekly “Extra” print/online sections through washingtonpost.com, this is the newspaper’s first significant foray into a separately branded and designed hyperlocal site.
For those of you not in the D.C.-area, Loudoun County is west of Washington, D.C., and home to Dulles International Airport and upwards of 250,000 people.
One of the interesting things about the new Loudoun Extra site is that it’s a community-oriented, hyperlocal site… but the site is not depending on the community. Unlike BackFence, which largely ran on contributions from locals, Loudoun Extra so far is fed mostly by professional reporters and journalism interns.
In explaining the move, Curley wrote in his blog entry, “Because — as far as we can tell — no one knows what in the heck “hyper-local” really means, we decided we’d try to take a stab at what we thought it means with this site. More importantly, we didn’t think it meant a site that was essentially just community publishing.”
To that end, Curley wrote, the site will focus on constant updates, dynamic databases of everything Loudoun, platform agnosticism and a ton of evergreen content.
The user-generated content features will continue to develop over time: “The irony here (or would that be goofiness?) is that even though community publishing is going to be a huge part of LoudounExtra.com, we actually launched the site this morning without any of those tools,” Curley wrote in a blog entry about the launch.
But even without some of the user-generated content bells and whistles, the site is an impressive effort. It will be even better by the fall.
Curley details some features of the site in an editor’s note on the site. Highlights include the schools guide, which includes photos, e-mail addresses, links to test-results databases, hours, contact information, maps and more. Some sites have panoramic views. The restaurants guide is also impressive. And, since Loudoun County is one of the fastest growing areas in the D.C. region, the editors included a moving guide with a boatload of information on everything from setting up utilities to registering your dog.
Since I was already logged in to washingtonpost.com, LoudounExtra.com automatically logged me in, which was nice. There are still a few flaws (of the “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” type), but that happens with most launches and I’m sure the team there will fix those quickly.
Credits on the site go to a lot of people (see Curley’s blog entry for the list) – programmers, designers, journalists, interns – and the site has more than a year of planning and work behind it. Some inside info to give you an idea of how much work this was (anyone who’s launched a major project will empathize): At least one person on that team slept on a couch at work in the days leading up to the launch.
Conflict note: I worked with Rob Curley in Lawrence, Kan.
Related links:
LoudounExtra.com
LoudounExtra.com Launches (RobCurley.com)
In Push for Local Readers, Post Unleashes LoudounExtra.com (washingtonpost.com)
Note from the Editor (LoudounExtra.com)
Washington Post’s Loudoun Extra Isn’t Yet Hyperlocal Enough (Publishing 2.0)