“While the Washington Post remains dedicated to maintaining a high level of coverage of the counties surrounding Washington, D.C., we found that our experiment with LoudounExtra.com as a separate site was not a sustainable model,” said Kris Coratti, the Post’s director of communications.
On Aug. 21, LoudounExtra.com will be turned off and its content, according to Coratti, will migrate over to the paper’s main site at Washingtonpost.com, ending a rare endeavor by a major daily to present news online in such a local and targeted way. DullesDistrict.com first reported that the Post planned to shut down the site.
When launched in 2007, the paper promised the site would be geared solely toward Loudoun residents, organizations and businesses and feature community news, events and sports sometimes reported on by county residents and local bloggers. Hyperlocal was the word coined to describe this way of presenting the news. The Post had originally intended to mimic LoudounExtra.com in other counties. It's unclear whether that will still occur.
"To us, LoudounExtra.com goes beyond the bells and whistles of community-publishing tools,” Rob Curley, the Post’s former vice president of product development and one of the site’s creators, said in 2007. “It represents a real partnership with local residents."
However, barely a year into the venture, The Wall Street Journal reported in an piece called “Big Daily’s Hyperlocal Flop” that the site was struggling to find an audience and that its team of creators moved on to another project in Las Vegas, leaving LoudounExtra.com before it was fully realized.
Broadlands-resident Erica Garman, a former correspondent for LoudounExtra.com’s popular and now-defunct Living in Loco blog, said it’s “sad to imagine” the market without the site. She said, though, LoudounExtra.com will have a lasting legacy in Loudoun’s news scene since the site’s unique “development” and “immediacy” of posting news forced other publications to improve their online presence.
In 2007, the Loudoun Times-Mirror redesigned its Web site, while earlier this year, the Independent launched a new site that relies heavily on video.
“I'm honored to have worked for such a stellar organization,” Garman said.
Tammi Wark Marcoullier, creator of the Living in LoCo blog, said LoudounExtra.com was a "powerful and positive" force in Loudoun media. On its demise, she said some of the site's features required too much maintenance, while the Post "never pushed" forward with other elements that might have garnered more revenue and attention.
"It will be interesting to see how community news in Loudoun continues to evolve," she said. "There is great opportunity here."
Besides online changes, Coratti said the Post also intends to launch this fall a new “robust” version of its tabloid-format Extra sections, which are delivered with the Post in most local jurisdictions. She said they will still be zoned by county and will most likely be renamed Local Living.
After they took over Tammy Marcoullier's blog, the site went right in the toilet. Bring back the grass roots Web 2.0 without the big brother and people will flock.