The Daily Astorian's decision to launch Seaside-Sun.com may make Seaside, Oregon the best covered small town in the United States. With a population of 5,000, Seaside, a tourist destination for locals seeking a quaint beachside village, has not one, but two local community websites dedicated to the town.
Sponsoring news organization: The Daily Astorian
Location: Astoria, OR
Owned by: East Oregonian Publishing Company
Founded: 1873.
Community engagement initiative launched: January of 2006
Online Editor: Laura Sellers
Software used: Custom-developed Web platform developed by Oregon web developer Going1Up.
Center for Citizen Media Podcast: Conversation with Laura Sellers, Online Editor, East Oregonian Publishing Company
HThe Daily Astorian's decision to launch Seaside-Sun.com may make Seaside, Oregon the best covered small town in the United States. With a population of 5,000, Seaside, a tourist destination for locals seeking a quaint beachside village, has not one, but two local community websites dedicated to the town.
Sponsoring news organization: The Daily Astorian
Location: Astoria, OR
Owned by: East Oregonian Publishing Company
Founded: 1873.
Community engagement initiative launched: January of 2006
Online Editor: Laura Sellers
Software used: Custom-developed Web platform developed by Oregon web developer Going1Up.
At first glance, Seaside-Sun.com, a site created by the East Oregonian Publishing Company to provide a spotlight on an area that's covered in print by EOPC's Daily Astorian, is a classic citizen journalism initiative, with a banner featuring what's become the basic triad of community engagement online -- click here to submit photos, stories, and events.
But a closer look at the front page reveals something more interesting: the Seaside-Sun is a new "front door" for the Daily Astorian's coverage of Seaside. The main column is mostly items from the Astorian's staff -- but items that probably get lost amid the other items seen by visitors to the Daily Astorian's main site.
The Boston Globe has recently adopted a similar tactic, creating topical and regional blogs on their site that don't link out to the wider web but instead link only to stories published in The Globe. In effect, these blogs provide quick, one-stop shopping for web visitors interested in a particular coverage area.
This strategy of segmenting the Web presence for smaller communities that might not be able to support a standalone print publication also yields benefits on the Web: small communities may not generate the number of online visitors that would create a critical mass of participants posting photos, blog posts, and events that would keep a site fresh and engaging. Blogs on the site, and submitted stories, don't appear to be coming in at a great enough rate to sustain the site's freshness, though a look at the photo gallery shows regular daily contributions from a variety of users.
Experiences like these seem to disprove the idea that citizen journalism will be most popular and effective in small and/or rural communities that aren't being served directly by a local news organization.
However, it would be a mistake to consider such efforts failures due to low numbers of participants -- especially when low participation numbers are in fact a hallmark of cooperative creation on the web.
For a town like Seaside with a population of 5,000, having 50 regular contributors would mean doing almost twice as well at attracting regular contributors than Wikipedia.
In the end, sites like Seaside-Sun.com may enable traditional news organizations to restore and expand service to smaller communities in a way that's cost-effective, even profitable, and to have a way to experiment with a true two-way relationship with readers at a lower risk than they might if they started such an experiment at their flagship news site.
Further Reading:
- Web site designed to guarantee sun in Seaside year-round," Sarah Burgess, Seaside Correspondent, Daily Astorian; article announces the launch of Seaside-Sun.com and discusses the Astorian's aspirations for the site.
Most Recent Items from "Wired in Seaside," online editor Laura Sellers' blog about the experience of growing Seaside-Sun.com:
