According to Evening Gazette editor Darren Thwaites, the website’s most successful section is Gazette Communities, a series of ultra-local sites.

“We have new advertising opportunities and it has generated great content that we can reverse back into the paper,” he said.

“I have been able to expand my team on the back of the commercial value of the microsites.

“We’ve got a combined 50,000 unique users across the sites and the more established ones are growing by 25 per cent a month.”

In fact, the Gazette Communities were so successful that Trinity Mirror launched print versions of the microsites.

Gazettelive.co.uk carries video content produced by 10 videojournalists, and puts a lot of emphasis on blogs, forums, pictures galleries and user-generated content. The Evening Gazette plans to recruit 160 community bloggers by the end of the year.

In line with this community engagement, the Evening Gazette and the University of Teeside have jointly created a multimedia journalism degree, and the university runs video courses for print journalists.

The Teeside Evening Gazette is probably one of the best examples of what newspapers have to gain by returning towards interactive, relevant, local coverage, and by using the new possibilities of the Internet to do so.

Source: Press Gazette through IFRA Executive News Service