NWN Media, which publishes titles including the Evening Leader and the Chester Standard, has become the latest regional media group to partner with property search engine Nestoria for its property listings.

Prior to signing up the Johnston Press division, the start-up has made deals with fellow regional newspaper group Archant and the Independent.

It’s also partnered with listings sites Zoopla and PropertyNews.com.

• Archant and Telegraph in geotagged search launches
• Adrian Jeakings will replace John Fry at Archant
• New look for Archant’s Eastern Daily Press
• Motors.co.uk expands regional newspaper deals
• Regional online traffic compared; Johnston Press comes out top

A case of great minds think alike today. Two lovely Dipity timelines for you to enjoy.

The Guardian plots media job loss announcements here…

and the NWN Media’s Evening Leader does a good job here, at plotting a North East Wales credit crunch line:

• Tool of the week for journalists – Dipity timelines
• Evening Leader plots UFO sightings with Dipity
• Evening Leader launches online courtroom project
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – tools for timelines
• Updating timelines – help us keep them representative and accurate

Nice use of timeline builder Dipity by the Evening Leader: the paper has plotted videos and text reports of UFO sitings in the area onto a timeline, turned it into a widget and embedded it on its website.

What’s extra nice is that the Dipity widget lets readers look at the info as a timeline, map, flipbook or list. Using the third-party service helps the newspaper get extra mileage out of what are no doubt already popular online stories.

The feature has also been made ‘public’ through dipity’s site to help drive traffic back to the Evening Leader.

The tool has previously been used by the Manchester Evening News for its coverage of a proposed congestion charge for the city; and the Liverpool Daily Post to create a 24-hour snapshot of Liverpool as this year’s European Capital of Culture.

• Tool of the week for journalists – Dipity timelines
• More from Dipity: Manchester Evening News plots congestion charge coverage
• Tool of the week for journalists – ProPublica’s TimelineSetter
• Liverpool Daily Post runs online diary to mark capital of culture status
• #ge2010: Digital timeline charts campaigning and media innovation online

At yesterday’s Digital Editors’ Network (DEN) event at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), UCLAN’s Johnston Press chair of digital journalism Jane Singer proposed a plan to free up the reporting time of local newspaper journalists:

Rather than re-writing certain press releases from local organisations and authorities, Singer said, newspaper websites could re-publish these releases untouched with their origins clearly marked.

This system should be in place in a designated section of the site clearly marked up as ‘press releases from Lancashire Police’ etc, and could even be a simple link to an organisation’s website or an automated RSS feed of releases.

Journalists at the paper would then have more time to follow-up on the facts behind the releases and put ‘news’ from organisations into context for readers, said Singer.

The idea was welcomed by some in the room, dismissed by others, who felt that republishing press releases could compromise editorial standards, even if the releases were clearly marked as not from the paper’s staff.

Yet others agreed that this could be a time-saving function of websites and help attract readers to the newspaper’s site as a first port of call for all local information.

So which titles are doing this already?

Wrexham’s Evening Leader has a list of links to local authority sites – providing the information on the site, but without the problem, raised by some editors, of running unedited releases from organisations.

The paper has a widget to receive RSS feeds from the North Wales Police website, which keeps it up to date with its latest press releases. Visitors to www.eveningleader.co.uk can follow a link from our navigation bar to find the page, Christian Dunn, the site’s editor, explained to us.

“It was one of our first experiments with embedding a widget on a section of our site. After listening to some of the ideas from the Digital Editors Networking event I’m going to make more of the section and talk to North Wales Police to see if there is any other material we could display for them,” he said.

“I don’t have a problem taking feeds from organisations such as the police and putting them on our site – as long as it’s clear the content is not written or produced by us.”

The Teesside Evening Gazette has its own take on Singer’s idea: its network of postcode-based hyperlocal websites link out to local community groups’ websites and local authority sites. They also link to BBC weather reports, which can be filtered by postcode too, rather than creating their own weather widgets or feeds.

Outside of the UK, the Knox News Sentinel provides feeds of political news and national news straight from the Associated Press and PR Newswire – and clearly labelled as such. While this isn’t specifically local info, it does take the onus off reporters at the Sentinel from having to repurpose this content.

This can’t be an exhaustive list of site’s putting Singer’s idea in to practice, so who else is doing this – in the UK or elsewhere? And does it work for you?

• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – get your press releases here
• Journalism.co.uk launches PressGo, a new press release repository
• Fox News TV aggregated through LiveNewsCameras.com
• Telegraph.co.uk: MSN discussing hyperlocal partnerships with local papers
• NUJ: Police reassure union ‘no more local press passes’

North Wales Media title the Evening Leader is offering readers the opportunity to play judge and jury in an online court on its website.

The aim of the Your Justice project, which has been launched with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in Wrexham, is to raise awareness of the processes involved in the CPS.

Here’s how it works:

• Real lawyers present their cases on a fictional court case to the reader in a video
• Viewers are given legal advice and will then be asked to give their sentence
• Finally a real magistrate will appear and explain what their decision would be.

“This kind of working partnership shows great common sense by the CPS – they can use our website’s traffic to get their message across and we can use their content to add more value to our site,” Christian Dunn, digital editor for the Evening Leader, said in a press release about the project.

• British journalist loses appeal against jail sentence in Singapore
• Reporting restrictions: who can access them?
• Job cuts at the London Evening Standard?
• Evening Leader plots UFO sightings with Dipity
• NYTimes.com: How Ushahidi is ‘transforming the notion of bearing witness’