Snapshots from the Edge: The Hartford Courant's iTowns

Last year, editors at The Hartford Courant began talking about enhancing local coverage and jumping into reverse publishing with a new product for print and the Web. The planning culminated this spring in the launch of iTowns.

In print, iTowns consists of six zoned tabloids, covering 71 towns, distributed with the Sunday paper. Each zone has a Web host who writes a weekly news wrap-up for the print section. The Web hosts' main responsibility, though, is to blog on courant.com about town news and events. The hosts, most of them former town news reporters, carry digital cameras and submit frequent blog entries that include photos they have taken.

Almost all the remaining content for the weekly print section is submitted by readers through the iTowns section of the Web site. (www.courant.com/itowns) Online forms allow visitors to submit text and photographs about local news and events into online databases. Stand-alone photos can be uploaded into a tool provided by Tribune Interactive's vendor, vMix.

Finding a way to display those contributions on the Web without turning to a full-service vendor
was challenging enough. Getting them into print has been even more so. Here's what we did:

• A new Web producer (a former librarian) stepped up to learn how to use QuickBase, a Web-based database application. She worked with the newspaper's IT department to develop online forms to collect visitors' text and photos for the database of reader-submitted articles. She uploads that data daily onto Tribune's content management system, where it is served to iTowns visitors. Selected articles and photos are then prepared for upload into the CCI editing system for print.
  
• The producer also created a database where readers can submit birth announcements, with optional photos. Staffers across several departments collaborated to create an interface where visitors can submit events listings which, after review and approval, are loaded directly into another database.
  
• The Web staff configured a new section of the site around the local news stories written by Courant reporters, broke it down into six regional sections and added links connecting visitors to the reader-submitted articles, events and birth listings. Links to localized lists of obituaries, school ratings, dining reviews and real estate listings were added to each town's page online. A new and growing restaurant inspection database proved immediately popular.
  
• The Courant's graphics department designed a lively new Web interface that incorporates the blogs, news stories and reader-submitted articles and photos. Fresh colors and bold logos were designed to fit into the site's existing templates, thereby preserving the functionality of the Web platform. Original artwork from the community is featured on the print covers and archived on the Web site. (See a description by Melanie Shaffer, The Courant's director of design and graphics, at www.visualeditors.com/apple/2008/05/a-look-at-the-hartford-courants-new-citizen-journalism-effort/)

The success of iTowns, thus far, can be measured in several ways:

• In the first month, readers submitted 1,003 articles to our database.
  
• An initial review indicates a total of 1.5 million page views for iTowns in its first month, which represents a 28 percent increase over the traffic to our local news section as it was previously configured.
  
• Print ad sales reached 75 percent of the 2008 goal before the print editions launched in May.

Among the lessons The Courant has learned from this experience so far:

• Creating a truly integrated Web and print product required the cooperation of virtually every department across news, advertising, marketing and information technology.
  
• Opening an outlet for readers to submit news and events was like opening a floodgate, and our news staff had to react quickly to assign additional editors to handle the flow.
  
• Visitors to the site appreciated the way we aggregated the scattered resources of the Web site at the town level, so that they could find a wide range of local information in the same place.
  
• Traditional print journalists can adapt and thrive on the Web with the proper support and training.

Jeanne Leblanc is Online Editor for The Hartford Courant. She can be reached at leblanc@courant.com