The Palm Beach Post wants to deliver news to the neighborhoods.  I’m not talking about those old “Neighbors” sections that languished and failed so miserably in our print editions.

I’m talking about Backyard Post.

It took William Harnett and his crew 574 days to pull it off, but who’s counting?  It features an interactive map, where users can click on their neighborhood and find out about schools, parks, libraries, and even create their own pages to share news and connect with their neighbors.  What you see know is just the start of what Harnett and the Post envision.

“Why shouldn’t the local newspaper be the party that delivers that level of detail and organization to its community?” Harnett writes. “Think of the value you can build on top of that foundation of neighborhoods. Not just value for your users, but value as well for the 80 percent of local businesses in your typical market that don’t consume any form of newspaper advertising.”

This is what newspapers sought to do, but couldn’t quite accomplish, with those failed “Neighbors” sections.

It’s an ambitious project but yet another idea of how newspaper web sites can reach through the computer lines and into people’s homes, no longer simply being the rolled up piece of paper at the edge of the curb.

This entry was posted by Ron Sylvester on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 3:10 am and is filed under Inspiring Work, Maps, Newspaper Web Sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.