Charles Apple

Melanie Shaffer, Director of Design and Graphics of The Hartford Courant, writes:

After reading your recent blog post about European papers embracing citizen journalism, I thought I’d drop you a line and tell you about a new thing we just launched at The Courant.

It’s called iTOWNS and is a gathering place online for readers to submit news briefs, events, photos and videos.

We launched serving 72 towns online in 6 regions. Each zone has a webhost, a local reporter who blogs about their region and helps readers with their postings.

Each Sunday, we reverse publish to 6 iTOWNS print tabloid editions. The webhosts write a small column about the vibe in their region and invite readers to participate. Aside from a week in review and two outdoor columns (one on horseback riding and one on hiking) the content is entirely reader submitted and entirely unique to each region.

On our covers we ask local artists to submit artwork. We are overwhelmed with the number and quality of work we have received.

We’ve given the community a new gallery. They’ve sent us all kinds of artwork, watercolors, collage, including photographs and even a quilt. Each of the six print editions has its own artwork.

We created a gallery online to feature all of the pieces. We also feature the artist on the contents page in print and online as well. They range in age from eight to senior citizens.

With this initiative we’ve been able to tap into a new local advertiser who was unable to buy into the Sunday Courant. We reached over 3/4 of our ad goal before the first print edition was published. Amazingly we did all of this without a single new hire.

Believe me, I’m not bragging about the staffing part, that has been and continues to be tremendously difficult, it meant moving folks into roles they weren’t terribly comfortable with and leaving holes in areas they once covered. Our events databases are full and backlogged and getting the information out of the web environment into the paper production environment is fast and furious.

Overall, the response is terrific. We are giving the reader a place to give us their news and information, this is all the stuff we’ve been turning away for years for lack of space.

Attached are this past Sunday’s covers.

…Which, of course, I’ve sprinked throughout Melanie’s letter. Want a closer look at any of the covers? Click a thumbnail:

These look wonderful, Melanie. And this sounds like a terrific idea. Thanks for sharing!

Find the Courant’s iTowns web site here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 7:31 am and is filed under Innovative ideas, News design, Newspapers, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.