Journalism Lecturer Alex Lockwood spent an instructive couple of hours in the offices of the Sunderland Echo talking with their digital editor about sport, hyperlocality and what goes on inside Blu Bambu…

It was an excellent opportunity to get inside a changing newsroom, with pressures of integration, industry sales and, even, writing copy. The paper is an example of both the innovations and challenges of how a successful local newspaper is developing its brand online, and tackling the industry-wide regional sales drops. However, as their digital editor–a very pragmatic, clued-up, positive, guy–told me, last year was a particularly good year for the Echo.

The Echo is my local media group. I wrote first ‘my local newspaper’, but changed that for two reasons: 1) because they’re not only a newspaper, and 2) because I rarely purchase the paper. (And ok, I’m not from Sunderland, having moved here six months ago.) It’s the double-headed problem for local news everywhere. The web is taking audience, and their paper audience is getting older (the region’s 18-24 age group is dropping by about 5,000 a year).

Their digital editor, Lee, saw the future as hyper-local news and information, and that could be Johnston Press’s strategy across their group. Lori Cunningham was appointed head of digital strategy in March, so her six months of bedding down will be over soon. It will be exciting–and important, for the future of press–to see the plans that develop.

I was surprised with the size of the audience: 282,000 unique users a month in June. Pretty impressive, and growing still. Sunderland’s population is around 177,000. They know there’s an ex-pat community looking in for the football, just as they expect a proportion of the site is people not from Sunderland, especially coming in for Premiership news. They’re launching an online survey to help with demographics, and also crossover between web and paper, which is something they don’t yet know. It will also give the journalists more information about whose reading their stories.

The clearest change from being a newspaper only press was that the web brings more bites at the cherry for each story. Not only can it develop from breaking NIB to splash to in-depth story in a much shorter time scale, with various live iterations, it is also creating new story developments–story comments and forum postings providing leads or additional live paper copy (”We had 50 comments on the story online by 5pm. One of them was…” etc). The web hasn’t changed the copy style of the live story that goes in the paper, but the newsroom are becoming advocates for their stories across forums and other blogs and sites, which is bringing in audience and, more importantly, building the brand among new communities.

Their biggest win online is sport. Not least because the stories lend themselves to optimized headlines (”Sunderland fans are fourth sexiest in England, but Liverpool, Fulham and Spurs boast real stunners“), but also, as Lee told me, because sport naturally lends itself to four or five big headlines, whereas one-liner news headlines have to compete with 20-30 other decent one-liner news headlines each day. (And they’ve been creative with their own version of citizen journalism, with the users writing the headlines for stories).

The main area of conversation was around video. There were about six or seven journalists in the press room who had taken it upon themselves to pick up the video camera and get out with it, and produce (mainly on Avid) small packages. They were useful news bites (such as the march of returning soldiers from Afghanistan) but the digital editor wanted more, and more easily made and uploaded. On mobiles is fine: what kept coming up was that the audience is savvy enough to know that web production values, as long as they’re explained, to the use, can be mobile quality and still get the visits and still do the job. We also looked at some local video work from sister paper the Yorkshire Post.

There were a number of insights into the role. We took a look at the back-end, an in-house CMS built across the group’s different titles that’s on a process of rolling-development; and a discussion about the quality of audience opposed to quality. The future is community and hyperlocal, and information-based as much as journalistic, if the Echo is going to take its brand and make it work online, which means the audience they need are the local community. (Hopefully this can tie in to the idea of digital localism and low-carbon living I’ve talked about elsewhere.)

Thanks again to Lee and the Sunderland Echo for the opportunity.