I wrote this back in May:
“I don’t understand why newspapers haven’t split off half their reporters to neighborhoods (requiring them to live there) and launching a network of hyperlocal news sites that all seamlessly feed back to their core site with an integrated CMS. (Beat reporters, meanwhile, would categorize their stories across relevant neighborhoods.) Having a neighborhood reporter is a powerful idea, especially when that reporter covers the small stuff in short form. This forms a relationship and an online community that generates more tips and a larger aggregate audience.”
And now the former managing editor of the Denver Post wrote this:
“Instead of spending time bemoaning how my owners are going to kill my paper, I’d make real sure that the people on my staff were covering news relevant to the communities where subscribers live. I’d fire a third of the editors and convert another third of them to being reporters and give them a laptop. I’d send all my reporters home with a laptop. I would tell each of them his beat is now a circle with a radius of 12 blocks and the center of the circle is his house. I want to know everything that happens within those 12 blocks.”
Similar idea, different perspective (although he suggests a minimum of one story per day, and I would take the blog approach, with a minimum of 3-4 shorter posts.) Regardless, I think there’s real merit with the idea of a neighborhood reporter — someone who people know who becomes the community “moderator.” I’ll have much more on this in the next few weeks when I reveal a project that I’ve been working on recently.
No related posts.
And exactly what are these editor-turned-writers with laptops supposed to write about the 12 blocks around their house? There’s a flu bug going through the elementary school? Little Johnny PerfectBoy got the lead in the school play? The U-10 soccer team won its game? Those damn teenagers keep loitering at the 7-11?
I don’t dispute that these things might be news or of interest to some people. But that’s the operative phrase: “some people.” A news organization should be striving to cover what is of interest to most people. And every time I hear some boss type screaming about how we have to get “hyper local” it makes me want to bang my head against the desk until it no longer has solid form.
Maybe it’s just me, but can any concept with the word “hyper” in it be a good thing? I get that any news organization needs to connect with its community, but saying things like “cover a 12-block radius” just sounds comp0letely ludicrous to me. The newspaper industry is grasping at straws and it shows.
If you don’t cover that flu-bug story, your competition will. And they’ll keep covering those flu-bug stories until they’ve built up that audience — stealing eyeballs from your paper. Then the day will come where a bomb goes off in that community. Who are the eyeballs going to go to? The paper who only covers that area when there’s something big going on or the paper who has covered everything about that community for the past year? Furthermore, who is going to be better equipped to cover that story? The guy who has reported on it every day for the past year, or the guys who just showed up when a bomb went off?
While it may look like that reporter, assigned to those twelve blocks, is covering a small area and small news — its making the overall product look huge because there’s news coming in from 20 reporters covering 12 blocks each.
Our viewers decide what news is. And they decide by going to the source of the news that is most important to them.
To use a baseball analogy, you’ve got to start playing small-ball because if you wait around for the home run you’re already out of the game.
I think there’s a balance here. I would split the reporting staff into a community pool and a beat pool. Beat reporters still take a traditional approach to covering the news — city hall, etc. — and community reporters cover everything that moves in their neighborhoods.
The primary newspaper site remains, featuring beat coverage as well as the best community coverage. Then there’s a network of community sites, each dedicated to a neighborhood, which feature a blog with frequently-updated neighborhood news as well as any beat stories that apply to that neighborhood.
Editors then become traffic cops, of sorts, to not only determine which beat stories get covered, but which community stories are elevated to the main site (and which community stories merit a longer write-through, since most will be blog posts). Community reporters wouldn’t work through editors except to pitch stories up to the main site (and for the occasional judgment call.)
I like the idea of having a main site for people who want umbrella regional/city coverage and neighborhood sites for stuff that’s going on around me. I think they complement each other. Some people like one, some people like the other. The community sites, also, are much more community-driven, with unmoderated comments and forums.
The end result of all this is MORE local content, the creation of communities around neighborhoods and more tips from readers. Because community sites have lower thresholds, people send in more tips (lots of people would never tip the Seattle Times, for example, because they don’t think the new restaurant opening in their neighborhood will be considered a story.)
From an advertising perspective, this empowers newspapers to go after small and medium-sized businesses, which is where the growth is. These businesses, on average, can’t afford a home page ad on a main newspaper site, but they can certainly afford an ad on a community site. And the geotargeted relevancy, of course, makes the community site ads a much more effective investment.
If major dailies took a look at small town dailies and weeklies they would know what they need to survive: Community news that covers every facet of life. That means the elementary school flu bug and the hospital job fair and the senior center raffle all get as much attention – if not more – than the random acts of violence, car crashes, court procedurals and terrifying acts of nature.
People would love to know what’s going on within 12 blocks of their home. They would love it if reporters would cover the little procedurals that Newspaper Guy considers ludicrous because to the people that live in that 12-block space that’s the news that matters to them. Newspapers don’t appear to be too interested in giving people what they want.
Add to that the fact that many major newspapers spend too much time devoting column inches to AP wire copy on content completely irrelevant to the local community, and you have another reason why people are tuning newspapers out and turning to blogs and other community / social / news networking sites to find stories that are personally relevant. (See West Seattle Blog for reference.)
odd how tv people want to take the pulpit on local… have you seen 99% of 99% of their OWN online properties?
it’s ap copy and national or out-of-market stuff (much of it not labeled as suchso many are tricked (suckered) into thinking the mantouk monster washed up in the detroit river).
to which (i’ve been told) ‘if we don’t give it to them the competition will’
to which i say, let ‘em have it.
i love seening that paris video or the mantouk monster on EVERY site coast-to-coast.
HEY! Don’t mock the Montauk Monster. He has powers. SCARY powers.
If a small town weekly with a staff of barely a dozen can cover half a county with stories readers are interested in – there is absolutely no reason why a daily with dozens of reporters alone can’t do the same.
Swallow your egos and hit the streets in your neighborhood. Not everyone can be Bernstein and Woodward.
I’m sorry, but this hyper-local thing isn’t going to work yet. Maybe in five years, but not now.
It all comes down to the revenue-expense equation. Ok, so Bob covers his neighborhood, flu bugs and all. Is Bob expecting to get paid a normal full-time salary for that? For stories that will attract a relatively small audience? You can’t expect to reach everyone in that neighborhood; you’ll be lucky to get 10% of the eyeballs in that area after a year or two of operation.
You might say that it’s hyper-targeted, and thus you can sell that small audience to businesses in that area. What is the cost to acquire that business, though? You can’t send out a big salesperson to make a pitch to every little shop in the city. Maybe you can skip the salespeople and just let them do a direct credit card transaction to buy ads, but getting the word out and educating businesses on the benefits of your system is going to be tough. Very tough.
Let’s face it — this approach would have a hard time getting off the ground, much less sustaining operations over its first three years.
Newspapers tried hyper-local back in the early 1980’s when they introduced “Neighbors” sections.
They quickly found that the revenue from hyper local couldn’t pay the salaries to produce it.
The problem with having a reporter every 12 blocks is that you need to pay someone every 12 blocks. Crowd sourcing, citizen journalism, user generated content and source-provided databases are great ideas but don’t seem to work for commercial, for-profit media. You need warm bodies to produce content at the local level…. but the revenue from an audience of a few thousand won’t support life at that level.
Hyperlocal news can work, after all, it’s worked before. Look at newspapers 30, 40, 50 years ago. They all had sections devoted to towns or neighborhoods.
Papers got leaner and meaner and turned more to big stories and miles of AP copy. They look prettier but lack substance.
I’ve been working in local news (very local news) for awhile now and people really do want to read about the flu bug at the elementary school. Why? Because if it doesn’t affect them, it affects someone they know.
This is where citizen reporters could really make a difference in coverage. But believe me, they’re not that easy to find.
Hey Doug, I agree that you get a lot better results when you have “boots on the ground,” so to speak. But the problem is that I think a lot of readers actually don’t take you seriously when you do all the minutiae. They say, “oh, you’re just the community paper.”
I know because I work for a suburban paper that’s had to refocus on community news to keep our edge. There’s a gigantic, highly-respected metro paper in our market. Not long ago we had one of those proverbial “bombs” that went off in our community. The metro big boys “flooded the zone” with seven reporters and a researcher. We had two people to put on it. They kicked the crap out of us. It didn’t matter that we are a daily presence in the community and they’re not. It didn’t matter that we covered the flu bugs and the trash pickup problems and the loitering teenagers (all of which we have done). We still got buried.
I’m hoping that as more metros make cutbacks, papers like mine will start filling their newsrooms with some of those newly unemployed people, because they’re more experienced and better equipped to cover a full range of stuff. Part of our problem is that we were trying to cover the “bomb” with two early 20-somethings with little experience in such things.
And I agree with the Anon. post that said there’s trouble with the business model of hyper local, but that’s a discussion for another time. I’m far more interested in the journalism.
Good points all around. The business is everything, of course, and it’s still in early stages.
But WestSeattleBlog.com has proven a lot. First, that it can scale beyond 10 percent of the community. They’ve reached upwards of 400k pageviews a month in a single Seattle neighborhood, and their unique users exceed the subscription base of the community paper. By a long shot.
They’re also selling dozens of ads from a variety of small and mid-sized businesses.
(I will have more to add on this in a couple weeks.)
I think there’s real value when you start networking these sites together. Individually, they offer ads for small to medium neighborhood businesses. As a network, they offer ads for the larger local/regional advertisers.
Yes, this hasn’t reached critical mass yet, but if local media waits until then, THEY WILL HAVE LOST.
This is the biggest problem for local media. They’re obsessed with short-term returns. They don’t invest in R&D. But now’s the time to invest in this. Because in 1-2 years, there will be substantial returns for those sites that have established themselves. And so far in Seattle, the sites that have established themselves are exclusively NOT run by the local media.
@Cory, but will sales folks from station groups stoop to sellings ads to small businesses even though the commission is not as huge as selling ads for an insurance agent or car dealership? And not frighten them off by upselling ad options they don’t want or can’t afford? Remember, you have to alleviate the impression that TV websites = expensive ads Joe Small Business can’t afford.
And the WestSeattleBlog style of online reporting will only work in communities that have a population base that actually goes online and can sustain such a operation. Seattle – yes; Spokane/CDA – possibly if it was done right, the S-R’s Huckleberries appears to be doing well; Colville (pop. 3500) – no way.
Stop telling people how badly they suck or that they are dying, maybe?
Of course everyone is focused on short-term returns — when you are faced with a $1 billion debt to pay back, you MUST have short-term returns. We can make fun of the big media conglomerates all day long for having dug the financial hole they’re in, but that’s the underlying story behind everything they’re doing.
If you want to talk about saving newspapers, you need to address the short-term as well as the long-term; there are undoubtedly some papers that won’t survive another three years without a substantial increase in revenues.
Gosh, I just found this thread.
Yes, hyperlocal can pay the bills.
I hate to talk $ but it seems everybody doubts this can happen, so I’ll be almost-specific: I made a six-figure salary as an assistant news director at a Seattle TV station until I quit eight months ago (tomorrow! I celebrate this anniversary every month). Our current ad revenue is comfortably past what my takehome pay was. Yeah, we have to pay expenses out of that, like health insurance (gulp!) but it’s not exactly poverty wages, and it’s growing. (We don’t even have the time to aggressively solicit new business, and still have enough word of mouth to get several inquiries a day.) We do ONLY local ads – not even Google text.
And we’re now past half a million pageviews per month. The number of uniques that hit us at least once weekly is indeed past what the local weekly newspaper claims for its circulation.
The latest marketing slogan I have noticed from said company, incidentally, is “all the (community name here) news that matters.” As if they are inferring the small stuff we report doesn’t matter. Got news for you all, IT MATTERS, AND IT MATTERS A LOT.
And I don’t even kid myself that we are doing that good of a job. I am no innovator. There is so much more we could be doing and saying and reporting and uncovering — just about this ONE PART OF TOWN! — if I had a tiny bit of help – that’s my one goal for this year, to actually make a hire before the year is out.
But it’s really hard work. I did old media — all of it, newspapers, radio, and TV — for more than a quarter of a century. I was always the one nut still in the newsroom after 11 hours or so, when everybody else went home. And yet it was a cakewalk compared to this. But every day there are a thousand small pieces of evidence that show us this kind of work matters. I keep evangelizing this to everyone who is bemoaning the state of the old media – leave, and go serve your immediate community, the one where you live.
We didn’t set out to do what we have wound up doing – this was just supposed to be a little blog! – but now that the model’s been proven (and certainly not just by us; look at Baristanet in New Jersey, among others, who had years under her belt before we sold our first ad last fall, and check Paulding.com, whose operator I met at the New Pamphleteers gathering in Minneapolis in June) many folks could set out to do this and do this well, in my opinion.
I also do believe you could scale this to a smaller community. Paulding.com’s P. Hughes has a lot of innovative ad-sales ideas way beyond the standard “buy a banner/button” – many of which I think could really amount to something in a small area.
Good luck to everybody who is brave enough to give it a shot. I made a leap of faith re: quitting my job last December (which was quite secure, although it’s a Tribune station so God knows whether it still would be now) knowing at least I could pay six months of bills by raiding my pathetic 401k, if I had to, and then slink back to old media if I really had to. I just wasn’t getting any younger and my gut said “if not now, WHEN?”