A bridge between newsrooms and local communities
Launched a year ago, InYourArea is a local news, information and community platform that combines updates from thousands of official news and data sources with updates from members of the community.

The aim of InYourArea was to make it easier for local communities to follow and discover news and information for their immediate area and to make hard to reach data easier to access. The other aim was to give all local publishers and blogs access to and traffic from a wider and new audience and to increase the frequency and loyalty of their users. InYourArea treats all publishers equally and doesn’t favour Reach PLC publications over its competitors.
Once we unlocked the ability for our consumers to become producers, InYourArea has proven to be an incredibly valuable tool for journalists too. Due to the core nature of the product being news and information, we see our users regularly posting newsworthy updates to their local feeds ( rather than recommendations and rants, which are the more popular post types on regular social media) , whether it be about a fire, traffic and travel delays, crime reports, events updates or simply a question about updates on a particular issue for their area. Our users are also regularly providing a 3rd dimension to the stories they read by adding their perspective or in some cases how they were effected by the issue first hand.

InYourArea has as a result become a very useful tool for newsrooms for several reasons.
- It is a valuable source of leads. When users post about an issue in their area our newsrooms will take note and follow it up. On many occasions this has resulted in publishing major headline stories.
- As soon as a potential story comes in, newsrooms no longer need to wait until the finished article is ready to publish (which can often take hours to verify information). They can immediately post a short update to the InYourArea feed stating “reports have just come in of X, we are looking into it and will keep you posted”. Users then have the ability to follow the post to be emailed as soon as an update comes in. These InYourArea posts have performed really well when shared on Social, resulting in newsrooms that use the tool being the first to get a story out. Once the full article is ready to publish, this is added to the origional InYourArea post and the article is then shared on social, driving a second wave of audience. These initial posts also often draw further information from the public which provides an invaluable source of information for the construction of the full article.
- It gives local communities a voice. InYourArea allows the community to set the news agenda and vocalise issues we may not already be aware of. As a result of this and to gauge the impact of an issue, we have built a ‘local campaign’ post type that a user can post to their feed and other users can vote on it to show their support. Our system automatically notifies the local council and the relevant newsrooms as soon as a certain amount of votes are reached, ensuring the issues with the greatest impact are given the exposure they deserve and the communities that post and support them have the greatest chance of making an actual difference to their community.

We are encouraging all newsroom to use InYourArea as a tool, both for growing their audience and to give the communities they serve a voice and a medium to make their stories and observations heard.
The platform is still in its infancy and work is currently underway to further improve the accuracy of local story detection, increase the available features and data sources and launch an iOS and Android app. We are also soon to start development on a set of tools specifically for newsrooms to make it even easier to manage and be alerted of leads, so watch this space!






