The Oregonian has plans to extend its hyperlocal strategy, Editor & Publisher reports. The publication, which already has 17 hyperlocal community pages on its web-partner Oregon Live, says it will be "adding more content to the existing pages and creating new ones in 2011."

The hyperlocal site focuses on sectional community news and allows readers to post relevant comments, news and event information on town-specific public blogs. Oregonian editor Peter Bhatia said, "They create room for a depth and breadth of community-level news that we never have had room for in the paper."

He also notes that the hyperlocal pages also deliver content to its Saturday "Community News" section which "combines several neighboring communities into one section and include items posted to the community public blogs."

The Oregonian is just one of many hyperlocal sites recently popping up in the US. The Patterson Press in New Jersey, for example, just launched a hyperlocal site dedicated to reporting on locally relevant civic affairs, while AOL's new service, Patch, is creating hundreds of jobs for journalists looking for work after being laid off by belt-tightening newsrooms.

So how is the Oregonian going to differentiate itself from the others? As Bhatia said, "there's an exciting twist." Last month the paper won a $50,000 one year grant from the American University's 'Networked Journalism' pilot project which will help aid the paper's quest to connect to independent hyperlocal sites. According to Bhatia, "the purpose of the grant is to build relationships between established media and the startups the Internet has enabled and to "amplify" the work of those community websites."

With the help of a community coordinator who will "recruit and coordinate" with partner sites, could the Oregonian could stand out in the exploding hyperlocal world? Bhatia writes that "Local news has always been the lifeblood of most every newspaper." Will hyperlocal websites soon be the "lifeblood?" According to Bhatia, "Building hyperlocal is seen as a content strategy for newspapers that can help secure a successful future."

Source: Oregonian via Editor & Publisher