By Peter John Meiklem, Media Correspondent

Hearing the relaxed response of BBC Scotland chieftain Mark Coyle to last week's launch of 12 "ultralocal" news websites in Glasgow would have been enough cause many in the Scottish news fraternity to choke on their lattes.

The Beeb's editor of continuous news was giving his thoughts on the Evening Times's new series of local web portals - to many, a direct competitor to Coyle's Scottish website patch of bbc.co.uk. The websites, he said, were so good that he'd decided to link BBC websites to them.

Excuse me?

And there was more: the dozen new sites, which went live last week and that will grow to more than 80 across Glasgow over the coming year, were just what he wanted to see from local newspaper companies in Scotland. The BBC's website, he believes, should link to other local websites, and the Evening Times project was not competing with BBC Scotland's local news strategy.

"There are certain things the BBC can't, shouldn't and won't do," he says, dismissing the suggestion that the innovation by Newsquest, parent of the Evening Times, Herald and Sunday Herald, could compete with the corporation's plans to ramp up online local video.

Coyle's position is radically at odds with the expectations of most of the Scottish media. The BBC has been criticised by newspaper publishers for its aggressive push into online local news and, although a truce has been holding, most expect hostilities to resume. Indeed, some newspaper executives privately talk about "beating the BBC" with their online strategies as they try to rebrand their companies from local newspaper publishers to multimedia groups.

With last week's regional Audited Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures making grim reading - almost every local and regional paper is down between 2% and 7% year-on-year - and with traffic to local newspaper websites increasing all the time, the battle to provide local news online is a fight that can only get fiercer.

Which makes Coyle's comments all the more surprising. BBC director-general Mark Thompson caused a stooshie in 2006 with his plans for what Auntie then called "ultralocal TV". Thompson's stance was enough to put Johnston Press chief executive Tim Bowdler on the counter-offensive, telling the Beeb it had no business spending licence-payer's money on a direct competitor to local news businesses.

Coyle says "hyperlocal television" is no longer a buzz phrase in the corporation's corridors. The new project, which has not yet been put to the governing body - the BBC Trust - but which is intended to go live in March 2009, is simply called BBC Local. Coyle says there was never a plan to provide hyperlocal news of the kind carried by the new Evening Times sites. The six areas the BBC divides Scotland into - roughly Edinburgh, Glasgow, Highlands, Tayside and Aberdeen and the South - was as local as the BBC ever wanted to go north of the Border. The extra content, Coyle observes, will be an extension of video content into those areas.

"Our plans to provide more local news in Scotland have never shifted in the slightest. I'm not afraid to say the Evening Times sites are good and if other companies came up with something similar then we would probably link to them as well. I hope we can be grown-up about it. The internet works through people linking to each other's sites. It is a different concept for people to go through," he says.

Helen Smith, community editor of the Evening Times and who oversees the 12 new Glasgow sites, is content with the BBC's decision to link its site to her community web portals.

Well aware that the competition for online local news provision is hotting up, Smith says the 12 sites were picked to give the widest geographical spread across the city. The portals are not competition for the Evening Times website, she points out, but offer a home for the kind of community news and announcements the physical newspaper doesn't have space for.

She reports a "tremendous response" from readers since the websites opened last Monday.

"There are loads of things going on in Glasgow that are perfectly worthy of reporting but there simply isn't space for them all in the paper. On the internet the space is infinite."

Each Evening Times site contains a noticeboard for community announcements, a selection of local news stories, community information such as the location of doctors in the area and other local information, including historical photographs.

Over a year in the planning, the first 12 sites, says Smith, are merely the "first phase" - with more to go live in the coming weeks and months until every part of Glasgow is covered. Smith says a lot of this will be based on reader demand, with sites springing up wherever they are required.

"We are really throwing these sites out to the community. We've set them up but they are there for readers to make of them what they will and that goes to the heart of the community aspect of the Evening Times."

Is Smith not worried about a drying-up of the sort of enagaging news that would keep the readers coming back? "No, because things happen everywhere. It might not be Earth-shattering hard news but there's always something happening," she says.

Evening Times editor Donald Martin was certainly confident about the performance of the sites. The potential audience is vast and goes far beyond Glasgow and Scotland,'' he said.

Initial reaction has certainly been impressive, with the sites attracting 100,000 hits within just a few days.

MICHAEL Johnston, Johnston Press's divisional managing director for Scotland, agrees that the future of local news lies increasingly on the web. Last week, his company announced a 6.3% fall in annual profits, a dose of bad news that was sugared by the provision of more information about the company's "hyperlocal" strategy, both in print and online.

While sportingly wishing the Evening Times project well, and saying that his company will look at web portals of its own if it proves successful, Johnston suggests there is such a thing as being too local.

"I start my daily journey in Edinburgh's Stockbridge area and I work next to the parliament building so I pass through a number of different postcodes to get there. I want news and information about all the different parts of the city I pass through, not only about the community in which I live." Johnston says his company has 320 local websites across the UK. In addition, there are six new sites "on the block", including one for the Aberdeenshire area, waiting to be launched in the coming months.

"We have all seen copy sales decline for quite some time," he says. "That's a worry but we must take that in a wider context. The approach now has to be multi-platform and if you think about it like that the picture is far less gloomy."

Stewart Kirkpatrick, an internet online consultant with marketing agency w00tonomy, disagrees. He thinks all newspapers groups still have not got "their head around the internet". He says the digital delivery of news is being held back by old media attitudes, such as linking local websites to newspaper distribution areas. There's more to life than local, Kirkpatrick argues.

"The stories that generate internet traffic are not local stories. It doesn't matter if the reader is from Pollokshields or Pittodrie, they don't just want to read lots of stories from their neighbourhoods. Plans in this area are very, very ambitious just now and the question that needs to be answered is how well will local communities use these sites."

Another experienced web news boffin, who did not wish to be named, is in no doubt of the vital importance of that question for everyone involved in the provision of local news: "There are a lot of people all wanting to occupy the same space. This area is going to be a battleground."