#ge2010: Sunderland Echo shares content with hyperlocal site to expand election coverage

The Sunderland Echo is sharing its live interviews with prospective parliamentary candidates with another independent, hyperlocal news site in the area, as part of plans for more news partnerships.

The decision to share the title's live chats and next week's liveblog of election night with SR2 Blog, edited by journalism student Josh Halliday, is an attempt to make the best of all resources available to reach new readers, Lee Hall, digital editor, told Journlism.co.uk.

"We want to expose our content to as many people as possible. It will drive some traffic back to our site, but we're not obsessed with getting web hits, we just want to get it out there. We will be covering election night live, going out with video cameras and tweeting to a liveblog. We're trying to do as much as we can on our resources given that it's quite challenging times for us," said Hall.

"Josh is asking some really important questions on his site and it's things that we're not doing. In an ideal world our digital proposition would complement our print part and a big part of that would be building a community, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of news sites aren't geared up for that. I would like to see us doing more of that going forward."

The sharing agreement with SR2 Blog is ad hoc, but Hall said he wants to forge more partnerships in the future to improve the Echo's reach and news coverage online and create a community between sites. It is a question of resources and finding new and free ways to expand what the paper can do and its audience, he said.

"One of the most successful things we've done where we've linked up with other people was our coverage of football transfer deadline day with the University of Sunderland. We got 40 students from the university of Sunderland liveblogging and live reporting transfer deadline day and more than 4,200 comments from readers. That's the sort of thing we'd never have resource to do alone, so linking up gives us greater resources and a great experience for the students," said Hall.

The paper has created an Election 2010 section for its website and, in addition to sharing some of its content with SR2 Blog, is looking to free tools, such as Cover it Live and Wordpress, to increase its coverage and what it can do with the election microsite. Blogs such as Echo council reporter Ross Robertson's election blog 24-hour Party People may not match the main site's template, but are quick and easy to set up and expand the site's election features on limited resources, Hall added.

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