60 Cities Go Hyperlocal in Utah with Nelda McAllister

Last week I spoke with Nelda McAllister. Nelda McAllister is currently working for the Desert News Online and is based out of Salt Lake City Utah. Her official job title is Online Community Manager of The Desert News Online.

What she actually does is everything from writing blogs to traveling around the state to meet with local city managers to get them involved in actively creating hyperlocal content and giving a voice to their community. So far she has met with more than 60 city managers and counting.
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Nelda, tell us a little bit about the Desert News Channel and your companies decision to build a hyperlocal website?

You guys are also a print publication?

The Deseret News is a newspaper published in Salt Lake City, Utah, and is Utah’s oldest continually published daily newspaper. It has the second largest daily circulation in the state behind The Salt Lake Tribune. The Deseret News is owned by Deseret News Publishing Company, a subsidiary of Deseret Management Corporation, which is a for-profit business holdings company owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (colloquially known as the Mormon or LDS Church).

Our www.deseretnews.com website has an international reach with 1.5 million unique monthly users and 20 million page views average per month. We also get a about 660,000 google references each month. 60% of our online readership is outside of Utah and 40% is in Utah.

Our print publication has about 75,000 daily publications and 83,000 publications on Sunday. We have a steady paper circulation but we know that our future is in the web which is why we are happy to report that our online readership is the best in the state for a newspaper and is rising.

You are actually very involved in helping people generate hyperlocal content. Can you share with us a little bit about that experience has been like?

My supervisor Charlie Craine, general manager of new media for Deseret News, and I have visited with public information officers, mayors, public relations specialists and IT managers all over Utah to show them our ideas and to get their feedback. Our site is actually very organic because we have built it off of their feedback. It is also in beta, however, so not everything they recommended is up yet.

We felt it was very important to get their support on this project and to personally meet them and create ties. Other sites in Utah have tried to create community sites but none of them have ever taken the time to personally meet people in city hall as we did.

Many times, the cities we met with did not have an RSS feed or twitter account so we would either talk with the IT manager and he figured out how to create an RSS feed or we would physically show them how to get on twitter in just a few minutes and start posting. When our site first went live, there were only about ten cities who were regularly posting on the RSS feed or twitter, but just in these few weeks we have seen quite a few cities notice they are not listed on the sites and they have contacted me asking how to get on board and I have walked them through it.

It is our goal to get all 216 cities in Utah as well as campuses or other communities that we are still discovering on our site.

Who are the actual people you are meeting with? What age range are they in and how receptive have they been to working with The Desert News?

We worked mostly with city managers and public information officers whose ages range between 30-60. They have been very receptive to working with us because they appreciate the time we took to meet with them, sometimes driving five hours just to pay them a visit e.g. Moab and St. George.

What amount of content is being syndicated onto the site from more national feeds? How much is local?

None of the content on our community pages is from national feeds because our purpose is to whittle down to local interests. We have found that our national and international news get some of the least page views on our deseretnews.com site in general.

Can you share a little bit with us about your team and platform you are working with?

Here is a link to an article and video that may help with some of the questions. Also, here is a link to a blog I recently started just about this site. I am turning it into a video blog and hope to get a lot of feedback that way. As I said before, we are basing our site off of people’s feedback.

Our team consists of Charlie Craine, general manager of new media, Joe Charbonneau, our programmer, and myself. Charlie has worked at the Deseret News for three years and has completely revamped deseretnews.com into a successful site. He thought of this idea last spring when he realized that reporters should really live in the city on which they are reporting. Although this wouldn’t be possible, he realized people were craving hyperlocal news and a great way to begin this is by asking the cities what the needs were. He wanted to create our community pages into the small local papers of 50 years ago when they listed school lunch menus, bus routes, and who just got back from visitng their aunt Thelma in Ohio, things like that. He then created my position and I was hired in late August.

Hyperlocal sites are relatively new so there was not any specific experience in it but it has been a ground up for the most part.

What’s the most surprising aspect of helping people get started in creating hyperlocal content?

We were surprised with the amount of cities who do want to get on board now that our site is up. We weren’t sure how they would react but quite a few citizens of local communities have emailed me saying things such as “Please consider the lovely town of Fillmore on your site.”

Can you share a little bit about your success with local PTA?

We definitely want to include school information in our site. We struggled a bit at first in figuring out how to do this because when we met with school district heads they were excited but said they did not have the manpower nor the time to update on our site. Then, we met with a UTA PTA vice-president and she spread the word about our site. Since then, I have met with quite a few PTA regions and have gotten a lot of interest. I have taught many of them to twitter and their tweets are on some of our city pages, depending on the city. Charlie and I are presenting at a PTA conference in May and will garner further interest there.

Are any of the content creators being compensation?

We do not charge for this product and also do not compensate. It is a totally free service. We do plan on having local ads on the right-hand column in the future which we will probably provide through online auctions.

Who are you guys watching and learning from? Any models?

Our model is based off of the cities needs. We are actually learning what not to do from sites that are out there, mostly sites in Utah.

Can you talk a little bit about the city by city coverage your site is providing?

We have 38 cities covered right now. Each city has three separate tabs (for now, later we plan to add a school tab and even a sports tab). The three tabs are headlines, bulletins, and events. The headlines are pulled from the local newspaper and from Deseret News. The bulletins are where we pull the RSS or twitter feed. The events are pulled from the city’s calendar and calendars in their area.

We plan to add customizable tabs at the bottom, photo galleries, local videos, local blogs, and a lot more (based off of feedback).

You will also be working with a few Universities and High Schools to put local content online? Can you tell us a little bit more about this?

We have talked with some universities PR departments about our project and they are on board. We plan to focus on them more during the next month. It is actually quite easy to get their information up because they have so many great feeds and twitters already.

Any tips or Advice you would want to share with other Online Community Managers?

Make sure you build a good relationship with the people with whom you are working the the local areas. As I said before, the cities were happy to meet with us and that has taken us a long way in getting their trust and maintaining a good relationship. I also give them regular email updates and calls as needed.

Learn More At:
www.Deseretnews.com