The Seattle Times built one of the largest networks with 54 partner news sites and blogs as of November 2012. That included 35 news sites, 17 lifestyle blogs and 2 ethnic news outlets.
It is the only Net-J project that actually developed a print product based on partner content. In April 2012, The Times launched a page in its Sunday paper that reported capsules of the week’s top stories from members of its News Partner Network.
Another hallmark: Seattle was the only Net-J site that made a full-blown effort to develop a regional advertising network with its partners.
Recruiting indie news partners in Seattle was no small feat. In no other metro area in the country is the news ecosystem as sophisticated and as competitive as Seattle’s, which has scores of neighborhood and topic sites and other mainstream news organizations seeking to partner with them.
Motivating The Times, in part, was the observation that quality was improving at many of the city’s neighborhood blogs even as the newspaper’s neighborhood coverage was declining.
Early on, The Times created a video, explaining the initiative. View it here: The Seattle Times: Community news site partnership from Danny Gawlowski on Vimeo:
Updates
- The Seattle Times and its partners collaborative project on graffiti took First Place in the Online/Innovation category in the SPJ NW Excellence in Journalism contest on May 21, 2011.
- The Seattle Times partnered with five more community news sites, bringing their network up to 39 total local news sites. (Read Poynter’s story: “Seattle Times, Hyperlocal News Sites Collaborate on Coverage”)
- The Seattle Time has also teamed up with KING5 to create a local online advertising network. (Read the press release)
- See a news feed from all of the Seattle Times’ network partners and check out their network portal page.
- Recently, the newspaper called on its partners to help tell the story of graffiti from different corners of their coverage area.
