Newsroom With A View

(Originally posted April 13, 2010)

If there’s a large event that’s going to attract many people from your market — a big festival, a sporting event, a concert — you have a built-in opportunity to get your live coverage and updates to a motivated audience. Better yet, here’s the outline for how to do it (the link provides a better, fuller explanation than the above slideshow). Here’s why you should print that out and save it:

“These events are ideal because the people involved have a shared interest that you can serve for content. Advertisers from your community and the distant community share interests with this audience. The people are not going to be reading a print edition of your home newspaper (even if you ship to the venue, you won’t reach many of the people) and they won’t be watching a TV station back home. They will be away from their office computers and if they travel with a laptop, they will leave that in the hotel room most of the time, while they are at the arena (or the National Mall) or out enjoying the host city at restaurants, bars and tourist attractions. But more and more, these travelers will have smart phones that will make great vehicles for distributing your content about the event they are attending, for engaging them in conversation about the event and for enlisting their help in covering the event and the related community travel experience.”