News Archives

New Residents Arrive at Our-Hometown
7/02/2009 - We are committed to finding the best talent to serve our customers. As our business continues to grow, so does our team.

Matt West
Software Developer
Buffalo, NY

Having an interest in Software Development since he was young, it was no surprise that Matt West would make it a career. After High School, he attended D’Youville College in Buffalo, NY and graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Informational Technology. While still attending school, his talent scored him a job administering the college computer labs, where he worked full time while completing his Master of Science Degree in International Business. Matt also participated in Google’s Summer of Code Program in 2007 and 2008 developing several new features for Geeklog CMS. This year he is back with the program as a project mentor. Needless to say, his been very busy – and all for the love of code!

His need for speed and efficiency doesn’t end with software development. When he’s not behind the computer creating user-friendly programs for our customers, you can find him behind the wheel at the track, racing his car for fun. His qualifications and abilities speak for themselves, and Our-Hometown is excited to welcome him to the team.

Welcome to Our-Hometown, Matt!

Newspapers have a good future

11/17/2008 - Rupert Murdoch thinks so! He says, "It may not be thrown on your front doorstep the way it is today. But the thud it makes as it lands will continue to echo around society and the world". Well said.

Florida Weekly and Our-Hometown collaborate to release new site design

10/10/2008 - Our-Hometown, Inc. has released their second new website design this year for client newspapers. This design is a result of a close partnership with the Florida Weekly group of newspapers in Fort Myers and Naples, Florida. The new image is crisp, colorful and draws readers’ attention.

"We've always focused on providing full functionality, ease of use (for publishers and readers), and the lowest response times with the highest availability possible. The look of our websites have, until now, been fairly utilitarian. Our engineers designed with our customer, Florida Weekly, a new very sleek look and kept all of our other features at the same time. I'm extremely happy to see the artistic talents of our customers combined with our top notch engineering skills reflected in our offerings." - Stephen Larson, CEO Our-Hometown, Inc.

The new design is now available to all current and new clients at no additional cost.

Business Profiles add value for advertisers

08/06/2008 - Our-Hometown, Inc. has added a Business Profiles system to our many features available to clients. This feature allows publishers to enhance the value advertisers generate from being an advertiser in their paper. By signing up for a Business Profile, your advertiser may now have their own page on your website which can show a map of their business location, hours of operation, contact info and more. This can be especially valuable to advertisers who don’t have websites of their own.

Business Profiles are a further example of how Our-Hometown, Inc. works closely with publishers to enhance the value of the business relationship. As another of our added features, it is provided to all Our-Hometown customers at no additional charge.

New website design released to Our-Hometown clients

06/01/2008 - Our-Hometown, Inc. has released the newest version of our newspaper client website. The improved layout is a result of internal development based on close involvement with customer requirement and suggestions. The image is clean, informative and attractive to readers and advertisers alike. (Read more...)

Are you unsure of the value of Internet advertising?

02/28/2008 - This paper provides the reasons Internet advertising has value and provides information needed by publishers and advertising managers to establish the fair market value of advertising on their websites.

Another $50,000 in online display ads sold

Bob Waitt, Director Of Advertising, Greater Media Newspapers, a group of 12 community newspapers in central NJ, added another $50,000 per year of easy revenue by adding all the display ads from their rather extensive Services Directory. This brings their total revenues from print display ads online to $350,000 per year.

01/28/2008 - Our editor now supports video upload and includes enhanced file maintenance capabilities. Browsers supported include Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape in addition to Internet Explorer. It works on Mac OS X and Windows 2000 / XP / Vista. Full details in the HTML Story Editor user manual (PDF).

October 2007 - The article, Local Media in a Postmodern World, Understanding the Yahoo! Consortium is the best analysis of the trap the larger papers/groups are falling into that we've seen. This article correctly identifies Yahoo! as the primary beneficiary of the Yahoo! Consortium deal.

06/19/2007 - Some ancient typographical methods are still in use today. We draw a parallel between these methods and the choices publishers face today regarding PDF & HTML.

02/14/2007 - Online subscription methods can allow subscribers to order an online only version of the newspaper, but should they? A few of our publisher have offered the combo of print and online at the same price as online only. In these cases, a surprisingly large number (especially out of towners) take the online only option.

This article from Circulation Management Magazine's website provides a deeper look at the online only option.

12/20/2006 - Miller County Liberal of Colquitt, GA added

11/06/2006 - We've prepared a report that provides a means of valuing newspaper website advertising based on the traffic using industry standard sources about the value of Internet advertising.

10/30/2006 - During September 2006, 1,001,666 unique visitors came to our customers' websites. Unique visitors are considered the most reliable measurement of a website's success.

07/17/2006 - Over $300,000 in online display advertising was sold by www.gmnews.com with little effort.

We made the decision to put all of our display ads on the web site at an increase of $8 per ad per paper. A letter was sent to every advertiser explaining the value of advertising on www.gmnews.com.

The program has been received well and there has been very little if any resistance. Putting the print display ads on the web site was a no brainer. The program will generate revenue in excess of $300,000 per year.

Every newspaper should consider putting their print display ads on their web site.

Bob Waitt
Director Of Advertising
Greater Media Newspapers
P.O. Box 5001
Freehold, N.J. 07728
732-358-5200 Ext. 8220

04/20/2006 - The case study by research firm, MarketingSherpa, Inc. titled, "How to Convince People to Pay for Local News Online: Give Away the Archives, says Our-Hometown.com", provides a complete description of our paid subscription model and its success.

04/16/2006 - Today the total of all news articles online for all our customers' newspapers was 505,656. In the month of March 2006 we converted 18,990 articles to HTML and over 26,000 display ads to our special format that allows the ads to be found in the search engines based on the words in the ads. These files were added to our newspaper customers websites as each issue of their print newspapers were published.

10/24/2005 News websites and blogs often invite readers to submit online comments about articles but ways to add a higher level of accountability to the process are needed. Some websites only grant permission if the contributor provides a working email address but with free email accounts readily available, remaining anonymous is way too easy.

Our-Hometown's novel "comments option" allows article-specific comments by paid subscribers only. If any of the posters get out of hand, the newspaper can trace everything back to the subscriber's account that can only be opened with a valid credit card and disable future comments.

This story first appeared in Newspaper Association of America New Media Federation's 9/30/2005 Online Publishing Update.

09/21/2005 All Our-Hometown.com newspaper websites that were running Google AdSense ads have been converted to Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) contextual text ads. Revenues from YPN for the first week of operation were 58% higher than the last week of Google AdSense revenues.

05/20/2005 More and more of our customers are sending all their ROP Display ads each week. The top five this week are:

05/04/2005 How many newspapers are online? We just did a market analysis that answers this question. We provide links to the reliable sources of much of the data. We had to guess some of it based on our experience but we clearly identified our guesses. If you happen to have hard numbers you can provide, please send it to us

05/02/2005 Our competition doesn't think search engines bring any benefit to community newspaper websites. It must be sour grapes because they do!

04/04/2005 Report indicates over 400 paid online subscriptions were gained in the first 2 years for the online edition of The Wave of Long Island of Far Rockaway, NY, a weekly community newspaper with a print circulation of 12,000. "Fresh News" is available to online subscribers only but the entire archive is open to the public in our paid subscription model.

04/01/2005 Report shows the Gaffney Ledger of Gaffney, South Carolina, a 3x weekly with a print circulation of 8,500, implemented our unique paid subscription model and gained 41 paid online subscribers in the first 63 days using our recommended pricing which values the online edition as much as the print edition. It may surprise some that the map shows most online subscribers are local in spite of the pricing.

03/30/2005 - We announced that on March 31, 2005 we're dropping Google AdSense™ as our default provider of third party ads.

03/27/2005 - We'll pass the 400,000 stories online milestone in a week or two. We're converting and adding about 11,000 new stories each month.

03/07/2005 - Our Hometown labs has a podcasting feature in alpha testing. Some bloggers create recordings of their musings for their readers to download and play on their computers or sometimes on their Apple Ipods. In our case, we've identified the best Text to Speech (TTS) software and are using it to "read" the newspaper stories. Click the podcast icon to try out the sample we made and let us know what you think about the quality of the test Podcast.

03/20/2005 - Kilgore News Herald of Kilgore, TX added

03/09/2005 - True Citizen of Waynesboro, GA added

02/03/2005 - Tri County Leader of Whitehouse, TX added

02/02/2005 - Splash of Pensacola Beach, FL added

02/01/2005 - Greater Media Classifieds of Freehold, NJ added

02/01/2005 - We replaced a competitive classified system at a long time editorial/display ad customer with our new XML classified offering. The classified manager wasn't happy with the number of screens he had to go through to see ads with his previous service and the pop-up ads drove him nuts.

The new system displays ads on the first click and the search function is simple and easy to understand. Display ads can be displayed based on the category (for example: employment display ads shown in the "Help wanted" classifieds). Now, the newspaper earns money with the third party ads running on their site. Their old system required that they run pop-up ads which did not earn the publisher anything.

The employment ad manager said, "It looks like craigslist", the system that has taken $50 to $65 million in advertising from newspapers in San Francisco alone. Emulating the good parts of a success is a good idea.

01/27/2005 - Gulf Breeze News of Gulf Breeze, FL added

01/19/2005 - Millen News of Millen, GA added

12/30/2004 - St. Ignace News of St. Ignace, MI added

12/27/2004 - Are search engines the friends of weekly and small daily community newspapers? For the answer to this question and the reasons why the future for community newspapers on the web is bright read this.

12/14/2004 - Our-Hometown, Inc. announced a reduction in the fees it charges in a letter to its customers today and pointed out that "No effort" revenues to our customer from print and online subscriptions, classified orders and third party ads exceeded total fees for the first time this year. The success of other revenues sources were also pointed out. More..

12/11/2004 - Town Crier of Mackinac Island, MI added

11/19/2004 - The Our-Hometown.com development team has implemented another system for ForRelease.com, Inc. called Archivester.com. The system provides links to files that are overlooked by the major search engines.

10/29/2004 - In September 2004, our news conversion service converted and published to the web over 10,000 stories from our customer's QuarkExpress, InDesign, Pagemaker and PDF files used to print their papers. In addition, the total size of the archives made available to the public on our customer's websites exceeded 300,000 stories for the first time.

10/29/2004 - Gaffney Ledger of Gaffney, SC added

10/01/2004 - Columbia Star of Columbia, SC added

09/10/2004 - Garden City News of Garden City, NY added

07/20/2004 - FOX's reality show "The Simple Life" targeted the audience for NBC's reality show, "Average Joe", and without any effort their ad appeared on a story with a local angle about "Average Joe" on the newspaper's website, thanks to our third party ad provider. More...

07/12/2004 - Stephen Larson, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Our-Hometown, Inc., announced today that the company completed a recapitalization earlier in the year in which Mr. Larson has acquired all outstanding shares of Our-Hometown, Inc. and all debt, other than trade payables and debt owed Mr. Larson, has been repaid. "This transaction greatly improves our balance sheet and clears the way for continued expansion of the company.", said Larson.

3/5/2004 - Simi Valley Acorn of Simi Valley. CA added

12/15/2003 - Our team implemented a NITF (News Industry Text Format) XML feed for www.ForRelease.com that automatically processes over 1,000 news stories a day. This technology can drastically reduce news processing costs for our customers.

11/05/2003 Connect job candidates with your employment advertisers. Ask us for details.

10/15/2003 - Greater Media group starts two newspapers. Edison/Metuchen and Woodbridge, New Jersey gains two community assets

10/3/2003 - Locally relevant web display ads earn high click through rates - The ability to find the ads on search engines add an extra kick

9/15/2003 - Third party ads: your gain, no pain
Our-Hometown.com delivers additional revenue to community newspapers with a paid online subscription model and third party ads

9/12/2003 - Edgewise of Rochester, NY awarded a contract to supply marketing support services

9/11/2003 - New Acorn group newspaper started in Moorpark, CA

8/21/2003 - This publisher left us for a short period for another provider that charged less but cost more: Amityville Record, Babylon Beacon and Massapequa Post. Now they're back and smiling!

6/18/2003 - Google announces AdSense™, a breakthough revenue source for community newspaper publishers. We've been a beta tester for several months prior to the announcement on all publisher sites to gather information on earnings, ad quality, etc.

6/11/2003 - Recent additions: Clarke County Democrat, South Alabamian and Thomasville Times.

2/20/2003 - Greater Media Newspapers agrees to put online as many as 44 special sections a year using our zoning technology and conversion services.

2/15/2003 - Almost 500,000 unique visitors came to our 36 weekly newspaper web sites in January 2003 and growth continues to accelerate.

11/6/2002 - Greater Media Newspapers starts The Brick Township Bulletin for Brick, NJ

7/18/2002 - The Acorn Newspaper Group puts The Thousand Oaks Acorn online.

6/14/2002 - Newspaper web site traffic study released

1/14/2002 - Hot Springs Village Voice of Hot Springs, AR added

1/14/2002 - We Announced "Story Studio", a Web Based Content Management System for Community Newspapers

7/5/2001 - Greater media buys The Atlanticville of Long Branch, NJ and The Tritown News of Howell, NJ

1/8/2001 - Unique Online Display Ad Initiative Gaining Publisher Support

11/30/2000 - Canarsie Courier of Brooklyn, NY added

6/22/2000 - Acorn of Agoura Hills, CA added

6/15/2000 - Service Gives Community Papers Own Web Identity for Minimal Cost, Effort

6/15/2000 - Herald of Randolph of Randolph, VT added

3/10/2000 - Greater Media Newspapers begins online publishing of Independent, News Transscript, Examiner, Hub, East Brunswick Sentinel, North/South Brunswick Sentinel and Suburban.

1/15/2000 - ACJ Newspaper Group joins with Amityville Record, Massapequa Post and Babylon Beacon.

10/2/1999 - Putnam County News and Recorder of Cold Spring, NY added

6/23/1999 - Queens Gazette of Queens, NY added

5/22/1999 - Wave of Long Island of Rockaway, NY added