The roll-out of 131 new-look sites began with the Hull Daily Mail portal in May followed by ten more last month.

This week a further 46 have gone live, including a new portal for the Croydon Advertiser, recently purchased by Northcliffe from Trinity Mirror.

The new site, www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk, is also an umbrella for 19 hyperlocal "sites within a site" including www.thisispurley.co.uk.

A further 53 sites will go live in mid-August, and the final 21 in mid-September, bringing the total size of the thisis network to 131 sites.

One of the features of the new technological platform that has been developed by NML is that the archive is now hard-coded so that stories remain on the site not just for three months as previously but permanently.

Content strategy director Robert Hardie said: "Newspapers now have the ability to put stories into a permanent archive, including old ones."

In theory, this could make it possible for tens of thousands of stories contained within the company's Tera archive from the mid-90s onwards to be made permanently available to users.

Outside of Northcliffe, the Trinity Mirror-owned Uxbridge Gazette is also boasting a new-look site which contains hyperlocal platforms.

www.uxbridgegazette.co.uk links off to ten more hyperlocal sites such as http://harlington.uxbridgegazette.co.uk.

Editor-in-chief Adrian Seal said: "The arrival of www.uxbridgegazette.co.uk is undoubtedly the key development for the future of the Gazette brand.

"We are particularly excited about the new hyperlocal sites we have developed and it's great that they are open to everyone from Scout groups to churches and schools and local residents in those areas.

"Already we have received excellent feedback and stories and items of news have started to come in through the website – it's very much part of the future for our editorial operation."

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