Introduction

Local media is reaching bigger audiences than ever across its printed newspapers, websites and broadcast platforms, delivering trusted local news and information to 40 million print readers a week and 37 million web users a month.

 

The first local media websites were launched in 1994 but until Locally Connected, local media planning currencies were focused purely on print.

 

Locally Connected is the UK’s first integrated print and online audience currency. It is the result of collaboration between local media publishers and agencies, the NS, JICREG and ABCe, to achieve a unique cross-media planning tool. It gives agencies the hard data they need to target local communities in print and online.

 

Locally Connected has revealed that local media websites increase the unduplicated reach of regional and local newspapers within their circulation areas by 14%, particularly among upmarket and core middle age groups.

 

Daniel Stephenson, head of digital marketing for the COI, said: “Delivering communications at a post code level where they’re really tailored to local issues is potentially very powerful… What is particularly exciting about Locally Connected is that it’s a tool that will drive up our understanding of our audiences and in particular their use of newspapers on and off line.”

 

The project was instigated by the NS in 2006 with the aim of extending the JICREG regional press readership database to encompass newspapers’ online audiences and provide agencies and advertisers with a geographical system for analysing the combined net reach of a newspaper and its website within circulation areas down to postcode sector level.

 

Internet audience data were released alongside print readership figures on the live JICREG planning system in July 2009, with the all-important data showing net reach of regional and local newspapers and their websites released in November 2009.