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April 4, 2008

Coventry gets the hyperlocal treatment

By Press Gazette

Trinity Mirror is set to launch hyperlocal news websites this month for two postcodes in Coventry, following the success of a series of similar sites on Teesside last year.

The CV5 and CV6 sites will be launched on a trial basis and will be part of the Coventry Telegraph website, coventrytelegraph.net, which re-launched this week abandoning the company’s usual ‘ic’suffix in its URL.

David Black, Trinity’s group director of digital publishing, said that the trial could see the remainder of Coventry – and then potentially some of company’s other 200 websites – getting the hyperlocal treatment.

‘We’re excited about the progress we’ve made with the hyperlocal sites in Teesside and we are considering moving the model to other areas where it works,’said Black.

‘We’ve got 230 bloggers and community correspondents so it’s a great opportunity for the public to contribute and talk about things important to them that are happening in their area.

‘With these sites we can really increase our penetration, and through doing that we can extend our audience reach, and through that, increase our revenue.”

At the Coventry Telegraph, an existing community desk team and web editor will run the two new sites, alongside local, amateur bloggers and correspondents.

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The hyperlocal sites are built by Trinity’s central product development team, which works with journalists and editors on each paper.

The Teesside Gazette communities site has 22 sections covering different postcodes around Middlesbrough. They are edited by nine Gazette staff and written by an army of more than 230 bloggers and community correspondents.

In Teesside, content is ‘reverse published’from the sites into free newsletters distributed in the area, but Black said the company would focus online only for the moment.

Black would not be drawn on whether the same system of local sites could work for one of Trinity’s national titles

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