'Daily Herald' Launches Web Community For Chicago Suburbs

By: Mark Fitzgerald The suburban Chicago Daily Herald on Monday formally launched Beep, the Web community component of a strategic initiative to grow an audience of young suburbanites.

This spring, Daily Herald publisher Paddock Publications will extend the Beep presence with a youth-oriented print product that will be a sort of "best of" from the Web site, President and CEO Doug Ray said in an interview.

"We've been pretty low-key about the print component because we want to launch without having two or three copycats out before we get out there," Ray said. "This will be a true Web-to-print product. But the primary focus will be on the Web, and the secondary focus on print -- which is different for us."

Beep began last spring as a kind of side project for graduate students in the Media Management Project Class at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. This is the class that in the past developed the Your Mom Web-and-print product for the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, and the alternative paper MKE for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

That site, which was the subject of an E&P story last May ("Honk if you want young readers,"), was devoted to blogs by several Daily Herald reporters.

This Beep is intended to start a Web community among area suburbanites, and includes extensive listings similar to the MetroMix.com offerings of the Chicago Tribune.

"This will have all the [readership drivers] the NAA [Newspaper Association of America] and others have told us are important: Make me smarter, something to talk about," Ray said. "They're trying to create a sense of community among young suburbanites."

Research for Beep found that while many young suburbanites have the stereotypical desire to leave their lawns behind and make a life in the city, "a good deal of them want to be out here, too," Ray added.

The site has already picked up some advertisers, including one, a wedding planner, that had never advertised in the print Daily Herald, Ray said.

Staffers for "Team Beep," as they call themselves, include a student hired from the Medill project, a bureau reporter given the job as Beep editor, and other current newsroom employees, plus a current ad salesperson.