In addition to the print articles appearing online, the Web sites includes lots of online-exclusive features, such as interactive mapping where a reader can type in their address and find drug bust sites from the past year within a specified radius of their house. Just for fun Online news sites could definitely have more fun. One successful and fun innovation is the Moose Hunt on the Web site of the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet . The paper planted a Web-cam in a forest, and Web users check the page regularly to see if they can spot a moose. When they do, they enter their name, e-mail address and time the animal was spotted.
Winners get a moose steak.
The advantages of this approach include that it's an easy upsell of printed ads to the Web, with no extra creative production necessary for the new-media component. At the Web site of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, an experiment began this week of teaching Internet classes in large auditoriums. Web general manager Ronald Dupont Jr. ran a series of successful classes in his previous job at the Charlotte Sun Herald , averaging 400-500 attendees in the small Florida town of Port Charlotte. Dupont is teaching the classes himself. Dupont says he's already gotten inquiries about the classes being taught in Spanish.