More praise for Fort Myers

The Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press, which seems to be an incubator for new ideas at Gannett, won APME's first Innovator of the Year award for its "culture of innovation." This is the paper that has mobile journalists armed with laptops, audio recorders and wireless Web connections out patrolling neighborhoods for "hyperlocal" news. The paper also earned a lot of buzz (on this blog and elsewhere) for its crowdsourced story on sewer problems.

I like the idea of both these things -- allowing community members to get involved with investigating a story and unleashing reporters from their desks. But, man, it seems Fort Myers is getting a lot of traction from one story a year ago and a lot of ribbon-cutting stories. (Have you heard of other crowdsourcing success stories? Know of any people who admit to being devoted readers of hyperlocal news?)

Am I being too cynical?

(Oh, the other finalists for the APME award: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle. The AJC was nominated for its newsroom overhaul. The D&C got the nod for its RocDocs, which gives online users access to data, maps and investigative reports assembled by the newspaper.

Atlanta, OC and alt-papers

Couple points from my morning RSS reads:

1. Atlanta's launching a free, P.M. Broadsheet that will be home delivered to non-subscribers, Charles Apple of VisualEditors reports. "Evening Edge is designed to provide busy people with help in planning their evenings and weekends. It provides ideas and recipes for quick dinners, guidance on what to do with (or without) kids in the evening — including spending quality time with their plasma TVs — weekend car trips, parenting tips, shopping opportunities and more. It replaces the more narrowly focused Thursday Buyer’s Edge.

2. Romenesko and the OC Business section report that the Orange County Register will cease publication on its 70,000 circulation, youth-oriented tabloid, SqueezeOC, and turn the content into a web only product, beginning Aug. 31. The Freedom veep for specialty media said, “It is a young adult audience and, generally, the first place they go for information - for things to go and do – is to the Internet as opposed to a print product."

Five questions for online projects

Staffers from ajc.com spoke at an SND conference last weekend in Atlanta.
They highlighted five questions to ask before starting an online project:

• Does it have an audience? Who?


• Will it generate traffic?


• Does it provide a service to the reader?


• Will it have a long shelf life?


• Do you have the resources to pull it off?

More at Charles Apple's blog.