The demise of the so-called “hyper-local” web site of the Daytona Beach News-Journal has some parallels in the Courant’s community news operation, iTowns.

Both operations started with a lot of staff and then lost some of it, leaving the remaining folks to struggle. I don’t know about Daytona, but this is classic Courant MO. Start with a big splash, then, when the excitement is gone, retreat to the next new project, diminishing the paper’s  ability to honor its first commitment.

In the case of iTowns, which is still doing very well readshipwise, the entire initiative was built on a promise by Tribune Interactive to deliver a software platform called Extrovert TI. This was going to make the task of publishing “reader-submitted content” doable by a relatively small number of editors. The Courant moved ahead in anticipation of the software, and when it became clear that the software would not be forthcoming, editors and ad sales people realized it was too late to turn back.

To this day, Tribune TI has not delivered (of course it hit that bankruptcy iceberg), but thanks to some inventive programming by Polly Edwards, Sandy Csizmar, Dave Berry and others, iTowns got off the ground and has actually grown in readership through the months. It is presenting reader-submitted articles more effectively than ever.

The elimination of most of the “web hosts” who were the face of the project is a loss and a retreat from the initial committment to cover and promote community life, but The Courant’s online design cleverly integrates the staff-generated and reader-submitted stuff. (If it didn’t, it would be painfully obvious to readers — or should I say more painfully obvious — at how limited the Courant’s local coverage is.) Sandy Csizmar has managed to get many of the reader materials to post to the iTowns pages automatically, saving readers from having to use a search function to find them. (This is a huge improvement in presentation.)

Anyway, iTowns appears destined to be largely made up of reader materials. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, necessarily. In some ways, the photos and press releases sent in by local clubs and organizations get better play than they ever have in the past. But iTowns is losing some of its personality and is less than what it was originally intended to be.

And a final note: the term “hyper-local” is corporate “newspeak” and should be seen for what it is. Community news, town news, is local news, not hyper-local news. The term hyper-local was invented by execs who wanted it to sound like covering local news was an extraordinary act — one they could little afford. At The Courant, local news was the backbone of the readership for years. Every market study proved it.