By Kevin Juhasz
Editor

With hundreds of sources to access news, sometimes the best way for a newspaper to serve its readers is to put a large amount of energy into covering the immediate region.

This is one of the philosophies of SavannahNOW.com, the online presence for the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News (daily, 62,715; Sunday, 75,960).

SavannahNOW.com’s goal since the site’s inception in July 1996 has been to offer readers an extension of the print version.

“I believe we have a good newspaper and that helps the Web site. If you look at our front page on any given day, both on the newspaper and the Web site, it’s very, very local — that’s our bread and butter,” said Mark Swendra, new media director for SavannahNOW.com. “With millions of Web sites out there, I’m not trying to compete with CNN, MSNBC or The Washington Post. We’ve got wire on there … but it’s certainly not something I put a lot of staffing into. We feel that if people who come to our Web site do want to find wire stories, they know where to find it, but it’s strictly local (information) that people come to our site for.”

Swendra said the newspaper has also made it a point from the start to get employees on the print side excited about using the Internet to overcome space limitations that come with paper.

“Since a lot of the content is newsroom generated, the reporters, editors and photographers could see the Web as something that was really special and really beyond what they could do on the print side,” Swendra said. “If we wanted to run a lot of different photos that didn’t make into the newspaper, what a great opportunity with the Web with endless space. With multimedia, (we can do) things we never dreamed about before on the print side.”

One of the most popular areas on SavannahNOW.com is a section that focuses on schools in Savannah, which has a population of around 200,000, offering visitors a profile of each of the schools in the area.

“This was something where we had a reporter and a photographer go out and take a picture of the school, and write some basic information. This is a nice tool for people when deciding where to send their kids to school,” Swendra said.

The school section also has searchable bus schedules, lunch menus, information on test scores and calendar items.

SavannahNOW.com also used the Web site to reach readers that newspapers are struggling to grab — teenagers.

The Savannah Morning News believed that simply adding a weekly section to the newspaper and then repurposing the content on the Internet would not be a successful approach. Swendra said the newspaper decided to take a reverse approach to the situation.

“We decided to put the Web site first. We hired a couple of high school students, and paid them a small fee to be editors of this. We provided the expertise on designing and basic HTML coding, and we went out and got a lot of (teenage) freelancers, and the result was this site called Savvy,” Swendra said. “We now are doing a print publication that once a month we put information from the Web site in the schools in some news racks for free.”

In addition to the basic news, SavannahNOW.com has a lot of tourist information. One of the most popular areas, is a section that focuses on the movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was based on a murder that occurred in Savannah.

SavannahNOW.com put up stories it ran when the newspaper covered the actual murder trial that the book and movie focused on, along with information about the filming of the movie and its premiere in Savannah nearly five years ago. Swendra added that the section is still drawing a large number of visitors.

SavannahNOW.com also has a large section devoted the city’s St. Patrick Day parade, which is one of the largest in the country, second only to New York’s celebration. The section was a finalist for an Edgie award.

The Savannah Morning News is a Morris Communications newspaper, so the site uses Morris’ SiteWeaver system for publishing editorial content. The site’s advertising banners and buttons are developed in-house, but SavannahNOW.com uses Open AdStream from Real Media to rotate the banner ads. The site also employs Macromedia’s Flash and Apple’s Final Cut Pro for multimedia content.