August certainly hasn’t slowed down here at NAA. Lots of updates, starting with…

TOMORROW!

NAA Webinar: Newspapers’ Win-Win Relationship with Retailers

Peter Krasilovsky (of The Local Onliner blog fame and senior analyst and program director for The Kelsey Group) is hosting a Webinar for NAA at 3 p.m. ET tomorrow (Tuesday), August 21. The Webinar is headlined “Newspapers’ Win-Win Relationship with Retailers,” and it’s based in part on Krasilovsky’s paper “The Online Newspaper Shopping Report,” which NAA published earlier this summer.

Here’s the promo: Online shopping means so much more than transactions. For newspapers, research and generating solid local business leads are an increasingly important part of the mix. Newspapers can leverage deep local knowledge and business relationships to benefit consumers in many ways. This Webinar is based in part on “The Newspaper Online Shopping Report: Online Relationships with Retailers,” a white paper Peter Krasilovsky wrote this summer for the Newspaper Association of America. The Webinar will focus on how newspapers can position themselves to take advantage of the company’s strengths to connect consumers and advertisers in innovative ways through the Web, mobile and more. 

Registration is open now!

On a related note, this month’s PRESSTIME Magazine cover story is on how newspaper Web sites are working to offer local shopping solutions. The magazine should be hitting your mailboxes this week. The article will be available online later this week.

Registration is also open for the August 29 Webinar on print growth strategies. Here’s the promo: All the buzz is about new product development and Web innovation, but what about the core print product? What are newspapers doing to grow their audience with their existing portfolio? Hear the growth strategies small and medium-sized newspapers are implementing to reach out to new audiences and grow their circulation and readership numbers. Examples primarily focus around circulation and marketing practices that have rendered proven results.

One of the speakers for the Print Growth Strategies Webinar is from Western Communications, which owns the Bend (Ore.) Bulliten. The Bulliten is also featured in this month’s PRESSTIME. The article highlights the newspapers’ three years of daily and Sunday print circulation growth.

New Snapshot from the Edge
Friday, we released a new Snapshot from the Edge about The Ventura County (Calif.) Star’s new video site, Studio805.tv. The Star launched the site in February to fill a television news hole and give a video-hungry audience local news in Ventura County. The site features a new local newscast every day at noon.

Update to Audience Building Initiative: Racine

In July, NAA published an Audience Building Initiative case study about The Racine Journal Times from Rich Gordon of the Medill School of Journalism. Since we published it, the Journal Times launched a redesign of the Website. We'll be posting an updated version of “Online Community at the Racine Journal Times” later today.