At a recent Kiwanis Club meeting to hear about the town’s new Hartsville Today citizen media venture, one man approached project leader Doug Fisher with a small complaint: “I’ve made Hartsville Today my home page, and it’s loading a little slow,” he said.
“We’ll get it fixed,” Fisher promised, with no small delight. It was another welcome sign that www.hartsvilletoday.com was working its way into the daily information flow of this South Carolina community of about 20,000 people.
In the seven months since Hartsville Today went live on Oct. 27, 2005, it has tripled its web traffic, posted 380 stories and photos, and attracted 100 people who have registered to add content to the site.
“The site has created a certain buzz,” Fisher said. When one poster wrote about a recent alligator sighting at a local lake, one of the site’s new stringers reported people gathering at the lake the next day with cameras hoping for a gator glimpse.
Among the first-year benchmarks:
- Site traffic increase to more than 5,000 in April from 1,700 last October. Fisher figures that about 70 percent of these visits are from actual users; the rest are from spiders and robots.
- The 100 people who have created site accounts have posted 211 stories and 169 photos – and the image galleries have only been working properly since March.
- Its partner, the twice-weekly Hartsville Messenger, has provided deadline coverage of events, especially sports, and re-published stories from the site.
- The site hosted two training sessions in writing and photo editing in mid-March at Coker College. Sixteen people attended.
Fisher said there was a jump in contributions after the training, and post-session surveys were very positive. “Those who attended overwhelmingly said they would tell others about Hartsville Today and they would encourage others to contribute,” he said.
The site invites contributors to be “community storytellers” rather than citizen journalists.
However, Fisher said there have been some delays and disappointments to go along with the successes:
- The site did not hire a stringer until May, missing most of the spring recreational sports season that it had hoped to cover.
- Minority participation appears to be low. Few of those who have registered on the site come from the city’s primarily black areas.
- Some features on the site are inactive or not working, awaiting attention from the Daily Messenger’s web staff. The “Report Inappropriate Content” and “Contact Us” links are inactive, awaiting a decision on who will handle those contacts. A news aggregator that is supposed to take headlines from local blogs is not working, and a planned “Our Hartsville” wiki has not been implemented.
- The site only has one advertiser. The Messenger, which is responsible for selling ads on the site, is in the process of training its sales staff to sell ads in the newspaper, the paper’s website, www.hartsvillemessenger.com, and the Hartsville Today site.
Coming soon: A cookbook on how small newspapers can integrate citizen media ventures into their other activities and deal with resistance at the news organization.
“We have learned that nurturing a site like this is a continuing effort that must be as integrated into the newsroom’s operations and culture as possible,” Fisher said.
