Your neighborhood news web site
The Palm Beach Post wants to deliver news to the
neighborhoods. I’m not talking about
those old “Neighbors” sections that languished and failed so miserably in our
print editions.
I’m talking about Backyard
Post.
It took William
Harnett and his crew 574 days to pull it off, but who’s counting? It features an interactive map, where users
can click on their neighborhood and find out about schools, parks, libraries,
and even create their own pages to share news and connect with their neighbors. What you see know is just the start of what
Harnett and the Post envision.
“Why shouldn’t the local newspaper be the party that
delivers that level of detail and organization to its community?” Harnett
writes. “Think of the value you can build on top of that foundation of
neighborhoods. Not just value for your users, but value as well for the 80
percent of local businesses in your typical market that don’t consume any form
of newspaper advertising.”
This is what newspapers sought to do, but couldn’t quite
accomplish, with those failed “Neighbors” sections.
It’s an ambitious project but yet another idea of how
newspaper web sites can reach through the computer lines and into people’s
homes, no longer simply being the rolled up piece of paper at the edge of the
curb.