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Fort Frances Daily Info

Fort Frances Daily Info was an online media portal covering Fort Frances Ontario and surrounding communities in Northwestern Ontario and Northern Minnesota. It is also one of Leschinski Designs first experiments in social media and citizen journalism.

In early 2005 Lechinski Design began creating an online media portal in response to the inadequacies of the local newspapers online publications. The monopoly held by this publication as the towns only daily newspaper had caused the company to become complacent, their site a time capsule of web technology, and along with complaints the paper didn't report the news in an unbiased manner on top of being held liable for slander we decided a more user contributed news model along with up to date technologies would be an ideal site to experiment with.

The basis of the site, community interaction, was derived from vBulletin forum software. We chose this particular application as the foundation of the entire site becuase it contained the majority of features we were looking for out of the box. A participatory news system was built on top of it, as well as a portal structure to create a mixture of social and media activity. Among some of our goals were to provide modern news distribution methods including RSS, the ability to include multiple media types within articles, and attract a core set of contributors.

In the nine months the site was in operation over 100 articles were written by users, including those articles contributed to the site through partnerships with local small bi-weekly publications like Fort Frances Living that also saw articles submitted online being used in print. It remarkably managed to attract an estimated 40% of the target population with no advertising or promotional efforts. Shortly after then end of this project the newspaper company previously described began adding similar features to it's site, and three years latter are playing catch up.