As part of my little experiment monitoring the improvements that need to be made to regional news, I’m going to take a few moments here and there to mention decent improvements. Steps in the right direction, if you will.

Take this effort from the Limerick Leader. An online memorial page, set up for Shane Geoghegan after he tragically died earlier this month.

It’s a great example of harnessing an existing audience using a simple Web 2.0 tool.

It’s by no means perfect, though. It’s very hard to go from the memorial page to the newspaper’s homepage – meaning any traffic generated by the feature will not be recorded. I’m not for a moment suggesting the motivation for this memorial is to get readers, but it’s a slip up not to include a promient link where people attracted to this site — new, young readers — can click through to the main Leader site.

Now strictly speaking Limerick wouldn’t be affected by a BBC local expansion as it’s in Ireland, but this ‘Announce’ software belongs to Johnston Press. Here’s a similar example for Sunderland.