New Jersey is ground zero for Gannett's hyperlocal efforts. The company owns six newspapers in the state and has also launched a network of hyperlocal sites, named InJersey, in large towns that are covered by its existing papers.
As a result, the company has had to manage two ways of doing business: InJersey sites require a bottom-up approach and a startup mentality, while newspaper operations require balancing long-standing institutions with an established staff.
For InJersey, Gannett has to treat the product as a bootstrapping startup. In order for the sites to be profitable, each needs to be independent and self-sustaining in both the editorial and advertising departments, ideally using little to no resources from the already-swamped newspapers. For the company's newspapers, however, the challenge is incorporating various departments such as the small team of site editors and the existing sales staff.
"I try to make sales part of everything I do," says Ted Mann, digital development director of Gannett New Jersey.
Mann is responsible for integrating new features across all of the company's newspaper Web sites as well as all of the development and design projects related to InJersey forcing him to act as the Swiss Army Knife for Gannett's digital properties in New Jersey.
For the newspaper, that means attempting to include everyone on each project. He says the best results come when the sales team is incorporated early, so everyone feels ownership of a product.
"They'll be more invested in making it work if they have a hand in creating it," he says.
For the company's hyperlocal sites, the issue is not wrangling multiple departments at different papers, but attempting to make the sites powered by the community they cover. Each is a BuddyPress-driven Wordpress install with a modified free theme that is managed by Mann.
InJersey borrows content from Gannett's local newspapers with the hope that the community will begin posting content, changing Mann's job from a digital director to a wrangler of user-generated content. Though a part-time editor oversees most of the InJersey properties. The editors are often staffers at nearby papers.
"These sites will really start to sing if everyday they have five posts from people in the community," he says.
Because success of the young InJersey sites depends largely on community contributions, selling ads using traditional methods can be difficult. InJersey sites currently do not pull enough visitors to make it worth the resources of newspaper sales teams, especially because many local small businesses require the ad to be designed by Gannett.
"They have a difficult job these days," says Mann of his sales staff. "They are trying to sell newspapers, magazines, and online. It's a little overwhelming."
As of now, the reach of the hyperlocal sites is small, but focused forcing Gannett to implement self-serve advertising. The company is about unroll PaperG's flyerboard, a service that allows advertisers to design and post their own ad, much like a bulletin board at a local grocer. Self-serve advertising combined with user-generated content can make the hyperlocal sites sustainable and, most importantly, useful to their communities.
“Ideally, they would be semi-autonomous, independent operations,” Mann says. And then, hopefully, a cluster of sites can have a dedicated site editor that takes place in a revenue share.
