ALBANY, NY (09/15/2010)(readMedia)-- readMedia's platform for syndicating hyperlocal news content may be an important new tool to drive profit and reader engagement to online media, according to results of a pilot with Hearst's Albany Times Union.

Using news stories created on readMedia's platform by colleges, national guards and state lotteries, the Times Union syndicated geo-coded headline feeds to its 14 hyperlocal community pages. Thousands of ZIP-code specific headlines about "Students in the News", "Soldiers in the News", and "Local Lottery Winners" were mapped to news sections on these community pages based on the hometown of the person featured in each story.

During the six-month pilot, reader engagement with the stories grew enormously: unique visits to these hometown news stories grew 180% and clickthroughs to hometown news stories grew 250% with no active marketing or merchandising of the new content. The stories were delivered automatically to the relevant pages with no editorial or technical costs after the initial setup.

"Locally targeted news about community members resonates with our readers," said Rex Smith, editor of the Times Union. "The challenge in print is finding a news hole for such targeted stories. Online, it's hard to match the cost of editing and publishing enough of these stories to the revenue we get on the web," Smith said. "readMedia's platform finally solves that problem."

Hometown news stories have long been a staple of local print journalism and remain "bread and butter" content for community and suburban newspapers. Colin Mathews, CEO of readMedia, noted that readMedia's value is not only in providing stories comparable in quality to those traditionally found in print, but in delivering them scalably, nationally and at a disruptively low price.

"The biggest issue for local online news isn't revenue, it's costs," Mathews said. "Success in hyperlocal will come when publishers have access to high quality, relevant local stories that cost much less to report and publish than their print counterparts. readMedia finally offers a solution that works for online media."

readMedia's platform will publish more than 750,000 hyperlocal stories in almost 20,000 zip codes in 2010, a 300% increase from last year.

#

About the Albany Times Union

Since 1857, the Albany Times Union has served as the major daily newspaper of New York's Capital Region. The print newspaper has a daily circulation of more than 90,000 and a Sunday circulation of 143,000, along with a vibrant online community at timesunion.com that includes more than 140 blogs. The Times Union is owned by Hearst Corporation.

About readMedia

readMedia's software platform enables organizations to publish their important local news to the media, local audiences, social media and the web quickly and easily. State and local government agencies, colleges and universities, non-profits and local businesses nationwide use readMedia's Newsmaker and Hometown Newsmaker applications to connect their news with relevant audiences. News organizations and online media can discover and syndicate hundreds of thousands of high quality, hyperlocal news stories published by readMedia annually in every zip code in the U.S.

readMedia is based in New York and is backed by investors that include Joe Mansueto, founder and CEO of Morningstar, and David Hosokawa, former CEO and vice chairman of Monster.com. Learn more at readMedia.com

Posted Wednesday September 15, 2010 at 11:32 am by readMedia, Inc.
Last Updated Thursday January 27, 2011 at 01:49 pm