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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Swallow your egos and hit the streets in your neighborhood. Not everyone can be Bernstein and Woodward.