Fisher Communications Expands Hyper-Local Network

By Andrew Gauthier 

TVSpy


Seattle-based media company Fisher Communications announced Wednesday the launch of over 30 hyperlocal sites in Oregon. In Portland, Fisher added 28 neighborhood sites, and launched another 10 in Eugene. The announcement comes on the heels of Fisher’s 44-site launch in the Seattle market in August.

The sites promise to offer more local content, including local business advertisements, and local news. Fisher-owned stations, KATU in Portland and KVAL in Eugene, will post news reports to the sites, which will be complemented by user-generated content. Windermere Real Estate, a local company familiar with the cities, will also provide content, as it does for Seattle’s hyperlocal network.

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“With our strong local broadcasting heritage as our foundation, we are building our ‘broadcast to broadband’ initiative in order to provide neighborhood information at a grassroots level while further enabling local businesses to efficiently reach their customers,” said Fisher’s President and CEO Colleen B. Brown. “This effort has been very successful in Seattle, our first launch market, and we are pleased to now be able to offer these services in Portland and Eugene.”

In a recent interview with the Puget Sound Business Journal, Troy McGuire, VP of news and GM of Fisher, discussed how the new online platform would affect KOMO’s newsroom and emphasized that operations would shift towards producing content for the web first and the newscast second. “For the reporters and photographers, it’s been a real culture change,” he acknowledged.

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