In the coming weeks, we City students will be re-launching the website for our Islington-based news site, Islington Now. A lot has changed since last year, when our predecessors on the Newspaper Journalism MA last updated the site, so we thought this would be the ideal time to reflect, review and update how we are going to take advantage of developments in online and community media.

Building a community – by Antonia

Given the community-focused content of Islington Now, we think it’s important that we identify prominent Islington tweeters, bloggers plus social media active organisations, bodies and companies. These can be as diverse as food bloggers and primary schools.

We hope to have a comprehensive grasp on these community ‘nodes’ way in advance of the site being fully active. Not only do we intend to connect with them via Twitter and Facebook – our primary platforms – but interact.

We hope to feed them our stories for dissemination, but also welcome back their leads. And we will garner social capital by both thanking our community for their thoughts, contributions and feedback, and also by drawing attention to their news, achievements and events.

On the site we will include a variety of ways in which people can contact us – and make it as easy as possible.

Personability – by Alistair

It’s always important to remember that a community, particularly a ‘real-life’ community like Islington, is made up of people – and people interact better with people than they do with corporate identities like newspapers or websites. While we want Islington Now to have a regular and well-maintained ‘official’ Twitter feed, we will also use Twitter lists and the main website to signpost ‘personal’ feeds, to give our readers direct access to our journalists.

Since we, as City Journalism students, have quite diffuse interests on our individual Twitter feeds beyond Islington specifically, we will set up shared ‘personal’ Twitter feeds for people with similar roles – an Editors account, for example, with clear signposting of who is maintaining the feed.

Measuring success – by Lauren

In terms of metrics, we will directly compare our week to week views with those on the website last year. The aim will be to increase the site’s hits from the comparable time period in 2011.

This will give us a better aim than simply assigning a target out of thin air. At the end of the week, we will be able to provide the editorial team with detailed feedback on what sort of content, or type of article garnered the most hits.

We will also look to re-engage and increase the site’s 838 twitter followers, and dramatically increase the Facebook page’s 14 likes.

What advice do you have for us? Is there anything else we should be thinking about in the run-up to the launch? Let us know!