Launch: LoudounExtra.com

Community-Level News, Events and User-Generated Content

Caroline H. Little and Rob Curley (washingtonpost.com)

LoudounExtra.com, a new site which provides in-depth coverage of community-level news and events for Loudoun County, Va., launched on Monday and signals washingtonpost.com's foray into producing customized 'hyperlocal' content. Making use of user-generated content, including multimedia, searchable databases, e-mail reminder services and in-depth coverage of area school sports, LoudounExtra.com is a comprehensive resource for local residents.

Caroline H. Little, CEO and publisher, and Rob Curley, vice president, Product Development, both of Washingtonpost.
Newsweek Interactive, were online Wednesday, July 18, at 1:30 p.m. ET to discuss the new site, answer your questions and explain features.

A transcript follows.

Anonymous: I was wondering if you had an explanation of what caused slowness and frequent outages of the site on Monday and Tuesday?

Caroline H. Little: We had server overload and some code issues, both of which we have addressed.

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Arlington, Va. : How long did this take to put together? How long would you anticipate it taking to put similar sites together for the rest of the area, as you suggest?

Caroline H. Little: We had been thinking about this for some time, but actually designing and building the site took less than 6 months. If we do more in the future, I am sure they will come on faster.

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New York, N.Y.: New site looks great. The graphics are smooth and the layout is well done. Is wpni going to become a host for many smaller local sites?

Caroline H. Little: This one is our first. We would like to do more. First we will see how Loudoun does.

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Leesburg, Va.: Why does the site look completely different from washingtonpost.com? Or will washingtonpost.com eventually look more like your site -- there seems to be a disconnect in the design which seems a little confusing since you're capitalizing on the Post journalism, or is the intent to move away from Post journalism? And if that's the case why launch under the Washington Post brand?

Caroline H. Little: There is no intent to move away from Post journalism. The site carries a lot of Post journalism and our team works closely with the Loudoun bureau. But the nature of this site -- heavy multimedia and a lot of data-based information--lends itself to this design.

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Potomac Falls, Va.: Why do you provide a list of all the users of your site, especially when many of them are identified by e-mail address? There does not seem to be an easy way to opt out of this "feature"...

Rob Curley: Because LoudounExtra.com is built on a different publishing platform than washingtonpost.com, one of the first problems we had to work on was a unified registration module so that a reader wouldn't have to have two separate accounts for sites ran by washingtonpost.com. Now that we see how this is working on LoudounExtra.com in a real-world environment, we agree with your thoughts completely and are working to make this appear on the site differently. No timeline is set, but it will be sooner rather than later.

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Falls Church, Va.: Who can I send my resume to for a job? I've got a few years of experience pushing content up on the Web.

Caroline H. Little: You can send it to our HR department, at WPNI, 1515 North Courthouse Road, Arlington, VA 22201

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washingtonpost.com: LoudounExtra.com

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New York, N.Y.: In Infoworld, you said that WPNI wouldn't let your team plug their machines into the wall. You must be a genius to have built this site without electricity.

Rob Curley: That comment was made in jest. Lots of my presentations use humor as a vehicle for making points. The point of that comment was that we are building our team's special projects on platforms that are different than what washingtonpost.com uses for its core site, and that means they have to be dealt with much differently by our systems and IT teams here at WPNI. But it was really just a joke.

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Cleveland, Ohio: This is a great project, but intensely labor intensive. Can something that focuses on such a small segment of your readership make enough money to pay the people you'll need to run it and other similar sites?

Caroline H. Little: It is less people intensive than you might think, given that a lot of the content is data-based, and we publish original content as well as content in the Post.

Rob Curley: The team focused on building this site has been doing this for about ten years so we really have this down to a science. The initial build-out takes awhile -- in this case about two months for data collection -- but the maintenance is extremely streamlined. Much quicker and easier than you might think.

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Washington, D.C.: How is this different than other services already available on your site? Isn't it pretty duplicative?

Caroline H. Little: This has a comprehensive database of restaurants, schools, places of worship, for example. A very comprehensive calendar. Generally more granular than what we have on washingtonpost.com.

Rob Curley: LoudounExtra.com has much deeper content for the are and much more focused content than the Loudoun content that has generally appeared on washingtonpost.com. There also is a much larger commitment to lots of breaking news and community news that hasn't always had a place to live on our site. We don't really see much duplication.

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Sarasota, Fla.: With companies like Backfence going under, are you going to approach these small-community sites differently? How much will locals get to contribute to loudounextra.com?

Caroline H. Little: We are making sure that we have news that drives viewership, and we have the advantage of having a Loudoun bureau. Readers can comment on stories now, and they will be able to upload photos within the month, and we will have more social networking capabilities in the fall.

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Baltimore, Md.: To have problems right off the bat at such a reputable site seems odd. Was there any performance testing done before it was launched?

Rob Curley: We did tons of testing, but sometimes you don't really know how something is going to react until you have about 10,000 people hit it in the first hour. Once we saw how the site was reacting to that kind of traffic, we quickly made adjustments and are still making adjustments.

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NoVa Do you see this as a way to help the problem of loss of readership, and advertising revenue that is taking place across the country? Do you see all newspapers across the country heading this way?

Caroline H. Little: This is an attempt to reach deeper into the community, and provide information to readers of a much more local nature. We are hoping this will be an attractive advertising proposition not only for existing advertisers to reach Loudoun residents, but also to new advertisers who may not be advertising on washingtonpost.com.

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Sarasota, Fla.: From what I've read, your new site does not have any community contributions yet. You are pulling from staff?? Can you elaborate on this? And are you concerned at all that using professional staff material might influence whether citizens post their own news?

Rob Curley: Community publishing is going to be a hugely important part of this site. But we've decided to try to handle this part of LoudounExtra.com in a much different way than our team -- and we think any newspaper or news organization site -- has ever tried, so we're still cranking on it. We hope to have this up and rolling by the end of the month ... knock on wood.
:)

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Ashburn, Va.: Why was Loudoun selected to be first county in the area for a site like this? Are there plans to develop similar sites for other D.C. Metro areas?

Caroline H. Little: We selected Loudoun because the Post publishes two extras there a week, it is a distinct county, and it is growing quickly. We hope to try another county soon but want to get some experience under our belt with Loudoun.

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Larchmont, N.Y.: Did you select Loudoun County because of the pun (i.e., the lowdown on Loudoun) or is that a coincidence?

Caroline H. Little: It is purely a coincidence.

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Rockville, Md.: The site looks great, but what's the No. 1 thing you wish it had that it doesn't?

Rob Curley: The community-publishing tools rank the highest on my list. We are currently building searchable databases of building permits, homes sales, and many other publicly available records. We also will be covering high school sports in Louduon in some interesting and very detailed ways, and I know we're all really excited about that. I personally can't wait to get all of the site working really well on mobile phones because I want to know the movie listings while I'm out shopping with my family on the weekends!

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washingtonpost.com: LoudounExtra.com

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Cleveland, Ohio: Can you talk about the merits of this kind of "hpeerlocal" approach to providing news rather than, say, starting your own all-encompassing restaurant-entertainment guide or spinning off sites focused on less bordered communities, such as college students or mothers?

Caroline H. Little: We know news, and we know communities around Washington, so this was a good place to start. But the restaurant listings and calendar are very comprehensive, as Rob has described.

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Alexandria, Va.: How will you know if it succeeds? Are there revenue goals or readership goals?

Caroline H. Little: Yes, there are guide posts for viewership and advertising revenue.

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Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C.: Why do you have to put your stuff on different platforms? Is this something separate from the journalism? And if so, why? I guess I'm puzzled as much as the earlier reader that this wasn't better incorporated into the washingtonpost.com design/look and feel.

Also, if this isn't a success, what does that mean for you Curley?

Caroline H. Little: We are publishing on a different platform because the Loudoun platform is more flexible for this type of database driven site. It has nothing to do with the journalism per se. I am confident that Rob and his team have plenty of talents, so I am sure we will find something for him to do if this doesn't succeed.

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NW D.C.: Do you plan to incorporate more local user-generated content, like make it easier for people to upload photos or videos of their own?

Caroline H. Little: Yes. Coming soon.

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Washington, D.C.: Rob,

You mention on your blog that LoudounExtra will be doing community publishing in a new way. How will your version be different and will it incorporate social networking?

Rob Curley: A flavor of social networking is coming to LoudounExtra.com, but if we just try to be Facebook or MySpace, no one will use it. Those sites and tools already exist and are very good at what they do. We have to do something like social networking in a way that makes sense for our washingtonpost.com readers in Loudoun. And in regards to the community publishing on the site, the ideas aren't really that new for the Internet in general, just new for traditional news sites. It's going to be fun to see it all come together and see how our audience reacts to it.

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Vienna, Va.: So why all the fanfare when none of the innovative features are there yet?

Caroline H. Little: There are more innovative features to come, but we think there are quite a few there already -- like the databases of places of worship, calendar, restaurant listings and the like. As well as the heavy multimedia focus.

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Washington, D.C.: What do the next six months hold for the future of this site? What big changes can we expect?

Caroline H. Little: More innovative features, particularly with community publishing tools and multimedia. And we will respond to our readers suggestions as well.

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Purcellville, Va.: You have had some coverage of the fight in Loudoun over school sites, including the recent community pushback on locating two new schools in the middle of farm land in Western Loudoun (Grubb Farm). Do you intend to devote any investigative resources to looking into the Loudoun County Public Schools? There is a real issue here: namely, why the process for school site selection is so idiosyncratic, unprofessional, and ultimately leads to bad decisions.

Rob Curley: That's a better question for The Washington Post journalists at the Loudoun bureau, who I'm sure are reading this. That being said, have you tried to contact someone at the bureau?

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Washington, D.C.: Do you, Rob and Caroline, live in Loudoun?

Caroline H. Little: I do not. Rob lives on the county line, and does a lot of his shopping there. Our blogger for LoundounExtra.com, Tammi Marcoullier,lives in Loudoun.

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Washington, D.C.: I understand and support the movement toward hyperlocal coverage, but why start with a locality that is at best over an hour from the core of your market? I believe there are still parts of Loudoun where the Post won't deliver the print edition.

Caroline H. Little: The Post publishes two extras in Loudoun per week, and we view it as core to our market.

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Virginia: Hi -- I like the site. I am curious what the competitive landscape is in what you are doing. Do you find that you have any many other companies doing the same thing as you? Do you expect to be profitable so you can keep building these local communities? What kind of timetable do you expect to grow?

Thanks!

Caroline H. Little: Yes, there are competitors. We believe LoudounExtra.com will be profitable over time.

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washingtonpost.com:  This concludes our discussion.  Thank you for joining us.

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