Wall-to-wall weather This is the time of year when many of us grow sick and tired of winter storms.  We’ve been dealing with slippery roads, icy sidewalks, and snow-covered driveways for months, so impending winter storms shouldn’t be surprising, right?  After all, we live in Minnesota.  But when local TV stations fuel the anticipation with [...]

Whitney Houston’s death, the threat of snow, and redistricting topped the headlines this month.  Below are the stories behind the stories. Twitter breaks news Whitney Houston’s tragic death on February 11 shocked the nation.  Notably, news of her death was first reported on Twitter by a niece of one of Houston’s staff, 27 minutes before [...]

January 2012 will go down in the books as one of the mildest Minnesota Januarys in recent memory.  But around the water cooler, people in the Twin Cities were buzzing about much more than just the weather.  From a half-submerged Target semi-truck to Red Bull Crashed Ice, below are some of the stories behind the [...]

AOL’s hyper-local news approach keeps expanding in the Twin Cities Patch, a national network of hyper-local news websites, started growing in the Twin Cities in November 2010 with seven sites.  In just seven months, it has expanded to 23 different metro communities from Hudson, Wisconsin, to St. Michael.  Patch is also planning to add more [...]

Goff Public often tells its clients that repeating themselves can be a good thing.  Using the same information in different ways in a variety of materials helps them reach more people. The media capitalized on this concept as the Internet became more sophisticated.  Rather than printing or airing a story once, each story can live [...]

It’s been another busy week in the fast-changing online world. Here are a few updates from The GH Spin’s “In case you missed it” file. Patch goes live: AOL’s hyper-local news source, Patch, went live in Edina this week. Patch journalists in several Twin Cities locations are already active on Twitter and Facebook. According to [...]

There is a new online news source heading into our market that The GH Spin is watching closely. AOL-owned Patch is putting the hyper in hyper-local news. It is creating community-specific sites for suburbs in 18 states so far (mostly near the coasts). It covers everything from little league games to crime, business openings and [...]