The Daily News of Los Angeles is launching four community news supplements in early October using articles and photographs submitted by readers, part of a growing national trend toward reader-produced “citizen journalism.”
The San Fernando Valley-based newspaper’s weekly Valley News sections will feature reader-written stories on their hobbies, volunteerism, recreational sports and special events.
It’s one of the latest efforts by newspapers to attract readership without investing large sums of money at a time when the Internet, cable television and other new media are siphoning away readers.
“It will be a quick read, an easy read, lots of the same elements we have at the Daily News, but it will have its own identity as well,” said Tracy Rafter, the paper’s publisher. “It’s really their (the readers’) paper. It’s what they decide to submit and generate.”
Owned by Denver-based MediaNews Group Inc., the Daily News publishes a main Valley edition, a Glendale/Burbank edition and staff-written local sections for eastern Ventura County, Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley.
The Valley News will get even more local. Each edition will cover about a quarter of the Valley, with the San Diego (405) Freeway the east-west dividing line and Roscoe Boulevard north-south dividing line.
For the Daily News that represents somewhat of a return to its focus in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it maintained a larger news staff in the Valley and surrounding areas before financial pressures caused it to cut back its local coverage.
Steve Outing, a senior editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said reader-produced local news supplements and Web sites may begin to replace local sections produced by a paper’s own journalists, which are expensive to produce.
“It’s really hard to have the staff to cover neighborhood news with the profit pressures newspapers are under,” Outing said. “If they can sell these zoned editions and get some advertisers that can’t afford to get into the main edition, it could be profitable.”
Parent company
Since April, MediaNews has participated in a citizen journalism experiment in its home market of Denver, where its Denver Post competes editorially with the Rocky Mountain News but the two papers collaborate on business matters under a joint operating agreement.
Denver’s YourHub, operated by MediaNews and Rocky Mountain News owner E.W. Scripps Co., is broken down into 39 Web pages corresponding to communities around metro Denver. Selected stories and photos submitted through the Web are then published in zoned weekly sections delivered with the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.
YourHub is the largest citizen journalism effort in the United States, but some smaller newspapers including the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo., and the Bakersfield Californian have embarked on citizen journalism experiments. The Californian has a separate bi-weekly section that features reader contributions that is distributed to some of its readership.
Locally, the Daily News plans to distribute about half of the 200,000 copies of the Valley News to subscribers on Wednesdays, while the other half will be delivered Saturdays to non-subscribers in targeted ZIP codes, Rafter said.
The sections also are expected to appeal to local retail advertisers who can’t afford an advertisement in the full 180,000 copy run of the Daily News but want to target a section of the Valley at a lower cost, she said.
By the end of the year, the paper expects to develop a companion Web site allowing readers to submit news and photographs specific to their neighborhoods that then will be posted for others to read. Selected stories and photos submitted through the Web then could appear in the print version.
The Daily News’ foray into hyper-local journalism is much more modest in scale than the Times’ ill-fated Our Times experiment, which blanketed scores of Southern California communities with weekly and even daily local supplements starting in the late 1990s.
Shortly after Tribune Co. bought the Times in 2001 and installed new management, the paper killed most of the local sections, deeming them financial and journalistic failures. Times officials did not respond to requests for comment on the Daily News’ new sections.
Rafter said Valley News, given its interactive nature and strong Web presence, will differ significantly from Our Times, which was written and photographed by lower-paid journalists. The Valley News will have its own staff, including at least one reporter and editors to read submissions from readers, although Rafter declined to say how large the staff will be or what the paper’s initial budget is. She added the reader-produced news sections aren’t intended to replace the Daily News’ own coverage of Valley news, sports and entertainment but will give readers another source of content.
“We have a mission with the Daily News and we’ll stay with that focus,” Rafter said. “The whole concept of citizen journalism is a different focus, and we think it has a place as well.”
