Fairfax County Government NewsCenter

About the Program

Category: Civic Education and Public Information (Best in Category)

Year: 2016

Fairfax County Government NewsCenter is a full-fledged editorial service for our community featuring relevant, timely and actionable content written in a unique voice focused almost exclusively on an audience-first mindset. It features a comprehensive digital presence, detailed social media strategy, branding and additional features such as embedded content, weather, traffic and a social media hub. Fairfax County Government NewsCenter represents a radical shift away from standard press releases from our government (and specifically within the Office of Public Affairs). NewsCenter is a platform to tell stories. NewsCenter is a way to reach our audience directly through an owned platform we manage, while sharing articles on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, Flipboard and Google News. NewsCenter allows us to use multimedia and storytelling like a journalism website. In short, Fairfax County Government NewsCenter represents a move toward brand journalism for a local government, in part because the number of journalists covering county government continues to dwindle. We now tell our own stories more directly to our constituents in an easy-to-read, packaged format. The NewsCenter vision statement is simple: “To selectively, package, promote and publish relevant, timely and actionable audience-focused information for our community.” The site at www.fairfaxcounty.gov/news launched Aug. 24, 2015. From that date through April 18, 2016, NewsCenter has yielded more than 560,000 page views in eight months, which would place it seventh among all fairfaxcounty.gov web pages in the same time period. In the previous four years of a prior online news presence, there were only 1.1 million page views, so the rate of page views in eight months for NewsCenter far eclipses the rate of page views over four years of a previous news hub. That’s a success and we look to build on it with new features in the months ahead.