Teesside’s Evening Gazette has launched six hyper-local community newspapers on the back of the success of its Gazette Communities websites.

The Gazette runs 20 ‘citizen journalism’ websites covering small geographical areas based on postcodes.

They include contributions from readers as well as relevant news gleaned from the paper or written by its own online team.

And some of this is now being ‘reverse-published’ in a series of free papers which carry the same area branding, such as Gazette Communities TS17.

The tabloid-size papers include reader contributions and other news from the corresponding websites as well advertising.

Three are published weekly and three are published fortnightly, and each are delivered door-to-door to between 5,000 and 12,000 homes.

Gazette editor Darren Thwaites said: “Over the next week we will be complete the roll-out, with six in total in the most vibrant areas where the websites are established and there is also the most commercial potential.

“At the moment the websites are split about 50/50 between user-generated content and traditional journalism. We wouldn’t have enough volume of content without the impact the web has had in generating contributions from readers.”

He said the new papers were acting as a signpost to the online service, and were also being used as a new entry for advertisers who had not previously used its online service before.

The new papers are not offering a print-only option, but rather digital only or print and digital combined.

Darren said: “There is real potential for small businesses to target just their postcode, or for bigger businesses to ‘cherry pick’ which areas they want to target.”