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Virginia Press Association
Imagine a local resident who hears a rumor about a public meeting and wants more information on when and where to attend. The odds are good they will be able to find the public notice about the meeting in the local newspaper or on the newspaper’s website.
Those odds have climbed higher in Texas as a result of a new project from the Texas Press Association and Texas Daily Newspaper Association.
The two organizations have produced a new website dedicated to public notices at www.TXheadlines.com. The public notice section of the site can be reached by clicking on Public Notices in the navigation bar across the top of each page. News headlines are also available on the home page and elsewhere.
The site now has nearly 70,000 public notices and news headlines and a fast-growing audience. Papers send their notices one of three ways: a manual upload, an RSS feed or an automated FTP feed.
There are several good reasons why newspapers should participate in the public notice part of the project:
1. It helps protect the public’s right to know;
2. It expands the reach of the ads that run in the paper — at no additional cost;
3. For smaller papers, it creates an opportunity to develop new technical skills and experience with an online product.
The news part of the project, which is in its infancy, will generate more audience for participating newspapers because it captures RSS feeds from newspaper websites. The feeds display the headline and first paragraph of the story on www.TXheadlines.com. When people click on the headline, they go to the full story on that newspaper’s site.
A similar project that launched in Virginia two years ago delivers as much as 20,000 visits a month to participating newspapers though the RSS feeds as well as related Facebook, Twitter and e-mail feeds, along with a customized search engine that indexes all newspapers in the state. A Texas site serving more newspapers and a much larger population has the potential for a substantially bigger audience than the Virginia project.
A critical element in making the project a success is getting as many newspapers as possible to link to the site. Even a link in the footer at the bottom of a newspaper’s site will make a difference in the results.
People rarely click on footer links. But Google and other search engines recognize the link and see it as a vote of confidence. The site ranks higher in search engine results, more people click on the results to go to the site, and then they click on the site links and visit the newspaper site.
This strategy reaches non-newspaper readers and increases total reach. Everyone wins.
If you have questions or comments about the project, please contact Scott Bateman, online media consultant/webmaster for the Virginia Press Association, at
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