I feature an interesting website, blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page or other online destination related to Waterloo Region on CKWR with Randolph J. Johnston called #WRawesome Online, Mondays at about 12:30. Here is the Midday with RJ’s Facebook page.

I hope by doing so that I’ll help people find places online that help them to connect to their community-online and in the real world. By doing so, I hope to help people find online places that they might not find otherwise and make our community a better place to live.

For folks looking for communications advice, you can get tips from each selection featured. I’ll highlight at least one example in my weekly post.

#WRawesome online: Kitchener Citizen

The Kitchener Citizen has a relatively new website. It’s a big improvement over their former website. You used to be able to read the Citizen online but it meant downloading a PDF of the entire newspaper. You can now read articles individually and articles are posted in between the monthly print editions. If you’re interested in what is happening in Kitchener especially on the neighbourhood level, it’s worth visiting.

There are actually two Kitchener Citizens since there is both an east and a west edition. Each primarily focuses on news for its part of the city. There’s an emphasis on good news but the Citizen also covers the tough issues faced by people living in its coverage area.

The Citizen is the little paper that could. It began in 1996 as a neighbourhood paper by Carrie DeBrone. Over the years, it grew and even outlasted Kitchener’s last weekly newspaper. When Carrie’s friend, Helen Hall, wanted to start her own paper the paper started two editions. There briefly was a third too but eventually Carrie and Helen decided to split the city between the two of them and renamed their papers the Kitchener Citizen.

Today, the Citizen continues to prosper by serving its niche despite the competition of a new weekly. It is now delivered with the local Smart Shopper aka Penny Saver. Look for it there and look for it here online. Be sure to share your newstips especially those that suit these papers better than the other local papers.

Easily shared articles important

I’ll admit I’m sharing this website because I encourage Helen and Carrie to put their articles on the web in a format that was easier to share than the old full PDF newspaper. I like to share articles especially via Facebook and Twitter and despite having some good content, I was reluctant to share what they published because I didn’t think anyone should need to download the whole paper and then search for the article. The norm was to be able to share a direct link to an article and now that it possible.

I’ve been giving that some thought and I think there’s a lesson here for charities, social profits, the public sector and business. Many organizations have newsletters or other publications. They tend to be good about putting them online-normally as a PDF. But if they are longer than two or four pages, they run into the same obstacles to sharing that the Citizen faced. And the more work that people are required to do, the less likely they will do it. They might once but aren’t likely to do it again if they found it too much work. In a social media age, you want to make sure that stories you are interested in reaching the widest possible audience are easy to share. That means making them easy to share with direct links. That could even help the articles to go viral (at least on a small scale); something that is unlikely to ever happened if the article is part of a large, multi-page PDF.

Something to think about when putting your print publications online in 2012.