Denver Post Unveils ‘New’ YourHub. But Is It New Enough?

Whatever happened to YourHub?

Six years ago it was major media’s first big foray into hyperlocal. Created by the Rocky Mountain News, the flagship of the E.W. Scripps newspaper chain, YourHub called itself the “electronic town square” of Denver and 40 suburbs sprinkled across the Front Range. A couple of months after its launch, it claimed 50,000 unique visitors. By the next year, it had signed up newspaper franchisees from coast to coast.

To its advocates, YourHub was the answer to newspapers desperately looking to replace shrinking print  revenues with digital gold. But digital gold, like the real stuff, is not easy to find, even for big newspaper companies that think they’ve seen the future. What happened in Denver is a sobering case study about metro newspapers and what happens when they plunge into hyperlocal.

In 2008, three years after YourHub’s launch, spokes started flying off the wheel. The Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee canceled its franchise because it was unhappy with the steady stream of press releases that YourHub pumped out, thanks to a lax registration system that permitted less-than-transparent signups. The next year the whole wheel went flying loose. Scripps shut the Rocky two months short of its 150^th birthday. YourHub’s remaining franchise papers pulled out. What was left—YourHub in metro Denver—became the foster child of  MediaNews Group’s Denver Post, the surviving partner of the two dailies’ Denver Newspaper Agency, which owned the hyperlocal operation.