FAIRPORT, N.Y., June 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- GateHouse Media, Inc. announced today that Wicked Local Plymouth, GateHouse Media's innovative, "hyper-local" website serving the town of Plymouth, MA, received the 2007 EPpy Award as best website affiliated with a weekly newspaper.
The EPpy Awards, sponsored by Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek magazines to recognize the best websites produced by newspapers, magazines and television companies, were announced recently, and Wicked Local Plymouth will be honored as part of a group of 32 websites from around the world at a June 24 presentation in Miami.
The one year-old Plymouth site (http://www.wickedlocalplymouth.com/) is the online home of GateHouse's Old Colony Memorial newspaper and an online space for community conversations, photo sharing, contributions from citizen journalists, local video bloggers and hyper local community information. It is the "beta" site, the model, for a network of town-specific Wicked Local sites that GateHouse plans to launch in over 100 towns throughout eastern Massachusetts this summer. (In New England parlance, "wicked" is synonymous with "very.")
"Our New England team set out to create a website that would be a one-stop resource for those living in towns where we publish. The EPpy is a tremendous honor and a vote of confidence that we are on the right track in our online strategy," said Mike Reed, CEO of GateHouse Media.
The EPpy joins other awards that Wicked Local Plymouth has previously received. Earlier last week, Wicked Local Plymouth was named Best Local Community Website by the Suburban Newspapers of America. In 2006, SNA named Wicked Local Plymouth Website of the Year. Also last year, GateHouse's Wicked Local project was selected to participate in the American Press Institute's Newspaper Next innovation program. It has since been studied by other newspaper companies as a model of how to break into the hyper-local online space.
GateHouse Media, Inc., headquartered in Fairport, New York, is one of the largest publishers of locally based print and online media in the United States as measured by its 87 daily publications. GateHouse Media currently serves local audiences of more than 10 million per week across 20 states through hundreds of community publications and local websites. GateHouse Media is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "GHS."
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