Regional Papers Court Military Readers

The Web sites operated by the Fayetteville Observer (N.C.) and the El Paso Times are far from the most visited news sites on the Internet. But these newspaper sites, and several dozen more that cover cities anchored by military bases, have been a vital resource for providing wartime news tailored to the military communities they serve.

"A lot of local sites are seeing pretty substantial increases in traffic" due to interest in war news, said Steve Outing, a senior editor at The Poynter Institute of Media Studies and a media columnist for Editor and Publisher Online.

Newspapers serving base communities are posting photographs and e-mail from loved ones deployed to the Iraq war, while others have built discussion forums, often frequented by relatives of deployed military members, Outing said. Some local newspapers have created war blogs, or online Web logs, providing updates of various war news.

According to Outing, many local news organizations were prepared for a flood of traffic on their sites -- a lesson learned after most news sites experienced massive increases in visits in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That surge brought many sites to a screeching halt, prompting operators to deploy new technology and resources to help handle higher than usual Web traffic, he said.

Here's a look at how just a few newspapers from military communities are covering the war:

• El Paso Times (www.elpasotimes.com)

The 80,000-circulation newspaper was gearing up to provide comprehensive coverage of the Iraq war long before the conflict started. But the newspaper, part of the Gannett chain, was not anticipating that the war would hit close to home so soon, according to Roy Ortega, multimedia editor of the paper's Web site, elpasotimes.com.

Five of the seven U.S. prisoners of war who were rescued this weekend hail from the 507th Maintenance Company based at Fort Bliss, an Army base in El Paso. The 507th POWs were captured March 23 when their convoy took a wrong turn and was ambushed near the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. Nine members of the convoy were killed and four more were injured. Pvt. Jessica Lynch, who was rescued in a daring special operations raid on April 2, is with the same unit. The newspaper's site has a special page with a map marking where the POWs were captured.

The elpaso.com site has also dedicated substantial coverage to memorialize the nine 507th members who did not survive the March 23 ambush. A special memorial page remembers each fallen soldier and another page profiles each soldier who was rescued or injured in the Iraq war. An article yesterday is about the funeral of Pvt. Ruben Estrella-Soto Jr., who was among those killed on March 23. Last Thursday, the site featured an article on Pfc. Lori Piestewa, another 507th soldier killed in the attack.

Since the war's onset and the capture of the 507th's soldiers, elpasotimes.com's traffic has surged as readers from the El Paso area and elsewhere scour the Web site for news about the war, Ortega said. When The Drudge Report linked to a story detailing how part of the 507th unit got off track and in peril, site traffic surged from an average of about 90,000 page views a day to 465,000 page views, he said.

"This is a worldwide story that became a local story, obviously because of the connection of this area to Fl. Bliss," he said.

• The Fayetteville Observer (www.fayettevillenc.com)

Fayetteville, N.C., is the hometown for the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, as well as several Air Force units based at Pope Air Force Base. The Fayetteville Observer has an embedded reporter/photographer team in Iraq with the 82nd, and both embeds are filing Web-exclusive items to the newspaper's Web site.