Local News Site Expands, Reflects National Trend

And now an update on a story we first brought you back in 2009... We told you about former Charlotte Observer reporter and current WFAE announcer David Boraks. He'd started a website to serve the town of Davidson with local news. Lots of it. Basically, when something happened in Davidson, Boraks wrote about it on DavidsonNews.net. Revenue was supposed to come from advertisers and donations from readers. But business was slow. And Boraks said there was a period early on when he thought he'd have to shut it down. "We were working on things," he said. "It was coming along but it wasn't coming along that fast. I'm spending a lot of time on it. I really was feeling like maybe it's not gonna work." But things have gotten better. And now Boraks is actually expanding his coverage area. He announced yesterday his company has hired a reporter who'll help generate content for a new site: CorneliusNews.net. The expansion comes in a city that's already covered by several newspapers and handful of magazines. But Boraks is confident his product will stand out. "We think we've been successful because we have something that's a little bit different," Boraks says. "It can be 24 hour a day, local news source. If something is happening in your neighborhood, you ought to be able to find it on the website. We find that people have come to rely on DavidsonNews.net for that kind of news here, and we are pretty sure there's an appetite for it in Cornelius." More Americans now get their news online than from newspapers, according to a Pew Research Center report released yesterday. The report says that 46 percent of people get their news online at least three times a week, compared to 40 percent for newspapers. Last year was the first time that online news consumers outnumbered newspaper readers in Pew's annual State of the News Media report.