AllPrinceton, a hyperlocal site covering the town of Princeton, N.J., has doubled its web traffic in recent months and recently joined a growing number of sites in the newly formed Hyperlocal News Association in New Jersey.
In the first quarter of 2011, web traffic to the AllPrinceton site has more than doubled on a month-to-month average, says Donna Liu, the site’s founder.
Liu attributes the increase in the number of page views possibly to bad weather that kept people indoors and the lack of other media outlets covering the immediate area. However, she says, it may also be “because we now boast a fairly steady stream of articles.” Those are generated by a greater number of contributors as a result of a partnership with Princeton University’s Press Club.
AllPrinceton has also joined in efforts to create the first Hyperlocal News Association for New Jersey. “With hundreds of municipalities, many of them not covered by traditional media, and with growing threats to the survival of both newspapers and public media in New Jersey,” Liu notes that hyperlocals are among the most promising news alternatives around.
The Hyperlocal News Association, of which Liu serves on the advisory board, is a project of Citizens’ Campaign, a nonprofit charged with cultivating public service leaders.
Liu indicates the New Voices grant has allowed her to match the going freelance rate in the Princeton area.
At the same time, she has continued to increase her outreach to the community and brought in more contributors. The local public library staff has invited AllPrinceton to set up regularly scheduled workshops in its Tech Center. The workshops include some basics in web literacy and how-to presentations on using the AllPrinceton platform.
The site also has regular “Town Talk” submissions from residents and local non-profit organizations, which were a result of a series of workshops held with the site’s partner, Princeton Community TV.
In February, AllPrinceton submitted an iPhone app to the Apple Store for approval. The process can take a number of weeks. The first phase of the app will be read-only, but plans are underway for a read/write version that would give users a mobile interface for submitting content.
