yelvington.com - hyperlocal

Hyperlocal lessons

yelvington — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:04:31 +0000

I don't see any point in joining the snarkfest that is unfolding on some blogs in the wake of the Wall Street Journal's highly critical article about LoudounExtra.com. But it does make me want to pass on some basic points that should be absorbed by anyone thinking about hyperlocal and citizen media.

"Hyperlocal" on the Web really has to do with finding natural geocommunities, where interpersonal connections (or great potential for connections) coincide with geography. Natural communities are hard to identify. It's more art than science.

Natural communities may be smaller than you expect. In fact, they may be too small to sustain a media business. That doesn't mean you can't build a business out of a network of hyperlocal products. Don't think monolithic.

Natural communities often don't map to political subdivisions. This is something I learned decades ago in St. Louis, a tangle of overlapping governmental districts that don't supply simple answers the simple question: "Where do you live?"

Natural communities don't necessarily map to the needs of marketers (the people formerly known as "advertisers.") This is increasingly true as America becomes Generica, land of fast-food franchises and big-box retailers. If you're a journalist thinking about doing this, you need to make yourself into a business planner first.

Natural communities have great potential for developing participative Web experiences (the practice formerly and poorly known as "user-generated content.") But it does not happen by accident. If you want to be a convener of community, you'd better be ready to get off your duff, away from the computer, and out in front of people. This is something you have to build by selling it in person to the people you want to engage.

And one last point. Geographic community ties are not as strong in this century as in previous centuries. You can do something about that (see Putnam and BetterTogether.org) but be aware that you're working against a climate shift.

Real people live local lives

yelvington — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:21:16 +0000

For as long as there have been J-schools, professors have been telling their students to refrain from projecting their personal experiences onto the world they're covering. At least I hope that's still going on. But judging from the responses to Jeff Jarvis' "Local lives" post, a lot of people seem to be forgetting how to do that.

Jeff's point: Local is very important, full of opportunity, and very hard to do.

The responses fall into two clear camps. One camp agrees hyperlocal is important. The other thinks local is dead and it's all about hyper-me. Me, me, me.

Here's the thing. For most people, there is no difference between hyperlocal and hyper-me, because most real people live very local lives.

I do not. Lately I'm acutely aware of how little I actually live where I live. I have a well-stamped passport, gold status on Skymiles, friends scattered around the planet. I dare not assume that other people are having the same 21st century virtual experience that I'm having with my wifi connections and my global-roaming text messages.

I get the point about hyper-me, I really do, but I also know that most people live locally. And for them, hyper-me and hyperlocal largely overlap.

Human beings need connections. We're hardwired that way. But modern life gets in the way. TV and the automobile sell us connections but deliver isolation. Stand at a street corner and count the cars with drivers talking on their cellphones. They're fighting back.

I'm looking at some proprietary research from one city where fully 38 percent of women who were interviewed reported that connecting was their biggest personal challenge.

Virtual connections through a social networking platform are better than no connections at all, but the real opportunity, I think, is in virtual connections that are combined with real connections. Physical-world connections. Hyperlocal space.

Learning from Backfence

yelvington — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:01:55 +0000

While I was traveling Backfence.com suspended operations, and now a lot of people are drawing conclusions, some publicly and some not. At the risk of further muddying the water, here are some of my own fairly random, jetlagged thoughts:

First of all, we should expect and even welcome failure. The trick is to fail forward and inexpensively. The Innosight folks counsel us to "be patient for scale, but impatient for profits." What that means is that we should make sure the business model works before pumping cash into it. We need more and faster failures that help us find a model that works, and only then pour significant money into the machine. This is easy to say and incredibly hard to do when a gaggle of competitors are launching nationwide.

It's still early in the game and the game is changing quickly. For example, the Backfence folks sunk a lot of energy and some significant amount of money into creating a technology platform after struggling with an early version of Drupal; by the time they actually launched with proprietary software, open-source Drupal had raced ahead. As this stuff gets technically easier and cheaper, you can expect a lot more experimentation. Someone is going to get it right. Someone may be getting it right this week.

We still don't know the right scale for doing this sort of thing, and that scale may actually be shifting as more people sign up for cheap broadband and become comfortable with creating and not just consuming content. Backfence cofounder Mark Potts once speculated in a conversation that the right physical community size is under 50,000. We've had great debates about that where I work; one point of view says a local high school district can serve as a useful proxy for defining a natural community, but your mileage may vary.

A successful community model and a successful business model are not the same thing. The tricky part is going to involve finding the intersection. Something like Front Porch Forum might have a great community model but never be able to make a significant profit, or vice versa. Or the right business model might involve delivery of a print component, something many Web-centric developers might overlook or avoid.

Everybody underestimates how hard and how expensive it is to build a powerful brand at a geographic community level. If you went down the street in one of Backfence's markets and knocked on doors, how many people would have a strong, clear, positive notion of what Backfence was all about and why they should use it? This is one place where incumbent, offline media may have a great advantage, although in many cases it can't deliver the message to the targets of greatest opportunity (nonconsumers).

Hyperlocal is about people

yelvington — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:59:05 +0000

Jeff Jarvis observes that hyperlocal is about people, not the tools used to connect those people. This is exactly right. I've been using the example of Robin Dunbar's number to explain this to newspaperfolk for some time.

For most people the little circle of 150 close friends and relatives is still primarily geographically local, and it's a circle that conventional media serves poorly if at all. The Web gives us some great new tools for penetrating that circle, but we shouldn't confuse our tools with our purposes.

It occurs to me that there's another shift that needs examination, and that's about the constructive social role played by media, whether it be yours, mine, or ours. I am still seeing a tendency to launch "hyperlocal community" websites with little attention being paid to the interpersonal processes of real community.

It's not enough to get people blogging or uploading news stories or whatever. The real goal needs to be social capital formation that is external to the website, and it's entirely appropriate to be using tools other than the Web to reach that goal. Those tools include physical-space meetings and in-person processes, and print-related components.

That's not hyperlocalism

yelvington — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:47:49 +0000

Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its report, "The State of the News Media 2007," and I'd really like to read it before commenting on it. Unfortunately I didn't make it past the first page of the 38-page executive summary before stumbling over this sentence:

For some, the new brand is what Wall Street calls “hyper localism” (consider the end of foreign bureaus at the Boston Globe or the narrowing of the coverage area at the Atlanta Journal Constitution).

No, no no! That's not hyperlocal. Not even close.

The Boston Globe doesn't do hyperlocal -- not yet, anyway. (They've hired innovator Bob Kempf from hyperlocal competitor WickedLocal.com.)

And as for the AJC, all it did was stop delivering the paper to remote towns where almost nobody was reading the paper anyway. What does that have to do with hyperlocalism? If anything AJC is moving the opposite direction, reducing the numbers of locally zoned editions and enlarging the zones.

There's a lot of good material in this year's report, but not on this topic.

MyClaySun.com launches

yelvington — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:49:42 +0000

MyClaySun.com launched today in Clay County, Florida, just west of Jacksonville. The blogs-for-all website is coupled with a four-day newspaper, around 30,000 distribution. The website has a couple of nits here and there that the tech team is still chasing down, but the community interaction seems to be off to a good start.

MyClaySun

yelvington — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:57:38 +0000

It's public now: We're launching another "daily" hyperlocal product, this one in a western suburb of Jacksonville, Fla., called MyClay Sun. It will have a four-day print publication schedule, "daily on the Web," with a participative community website. Some elements will be very similar to Bluffton Today, but there also will be some significant differences. Launch date is the middle of next month.

LA Times: The sleeper awakens

yelvington — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 04:15:44 +0000

A few weeks ago the word was that the Los Angeles Times' "Manhattan project" (renamed "Spring Street") report had disappeared into the bureaucracy, never to be seen again. But it resurfaced today full of fury in a major shakeup outlined by Staci Kramer at paidContent.org. This is a big deal, and is especially remarkable considering the conditions under which it's happening. Ordinarily, when a company is on the auction block, paralysis ensues -- not radical change.

I've written about the Los Angeles Times previously. It is the poster child for the endangered metro newspaper, and it's significant that Rob Barrett, who "wanted to go hyperlocal," has come out on top. Our Bluffton Today was one of the case studies examined by Times reporters in their research. Can the Times be a newspaper of national stature and a family of hyperlocal, personally relevant products? This is going to be interesting.

Our big world of small worlds

yelvington — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:32:02 +0000

Not long ago someone suggested I might be an isolationist, based on something I had written about the fading role of world and national news and the rise of hyperlocalism in newspapers.

I took my wife and my youngest daughter to the airport Monday, where they turned a hundred thousand of my frequent-flier miles into a trip to Europe. We will spend our Christmas holiday separated by thousands of miles because we believe it's that important for young people to get a broader view of the world than they can get by staying home.

Except for a weekend in Canada, I didn't travel internationally until I was over 40. Now I can't get enough of it, and everyone in my family is collecting visa stamps in their passports.

One of my great frustrations is that, like most Americans, I can't carry on a conversation in any language other than English. I had to turn down a potential gig in Madrid the other day because my Castellano is fit only for ordering una cerveza, por favor. My relationship with half a dozen other languages is similar.

There is, however, an isolationist streak in American culture, and when it collides with the reality of a rapidly shrinking world the results can be ugly. You can see that in the anti-Hispanic immigration backlash being exploited by the crass TV demagogue Lou Dobbs, but equally in the ignorant arrogance that has led to the bloody chaos in Iraq and the downfall of America as a world leader. I don't want my kids to grow up so handicapped.

So I'm a bit of an internationalist. But at the same time I recognize that we all live simultaneously in multiple worlds.

I have a work world, a family world, a neighborhood world, a number of worlds of special interests, and in each of those worlds I have different needs for current and persistent information, connections, and commercial interaction. Some of those worlds are hyperlocal; others may be hyperspecialized.

The problem faced by "general" news organizations is that they fit poorly into a matrix of specialization. American newspapers in particular are poorly suited to specialization. They evolved in an information economy (and entertainment economy) of scarcity. In the 19th century a daily printed product was an exciting breakthrough in bandwidth; in the 21st it's a puny little trickle.

Yet most American newspapers continue to operate on the omnibus model, dumping onto the doorstep (or, more often, throwing into the driveway) a mashup of local, regional, national and global news, sports and business coverage. It is a stew suited to an earlier era, one that is consumed not to satisfy needs but rather to satisfy a fading habit.

I believe American newspapers need a complete restructuring of journalism priorities and processes. When I advocate hyperlocalism, it's not because I lack interest in global topics; it's that I believe newspapers must specialize to survive.

The local and hyperlocal spaces in which we all live are full of unmet and poorly met needs in the areas of information and connectivity/communications. Those areas constitute opportunities. Who will focus their resources on them?

Dumbing down media commentary

yelvington — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 21:41:04 +0000

One of the more self-destructive traits of American journalism is the general disdain of local reporting. In the news biz there is a pecking order, and second-worst place to be is a suburban bureau. The absolutely worst place to be is a newspaper so small that it doesn't have any suburban bureaus.

Writing for Slate, media commentator Jack Schafer piles it on, saying newspapers that focus on local news are "dumbing down" and "targeting a less-educated audience."

Smaller and more locally focused newspapers happen to be the only happy story in print journalism these days.

The bigger the newspaper, the more it stuffs its columns full of wire news that everyone already knows about in this internetworked world we live in, the more likely it is that the paper's having horrendous circulation troubles.

Churn rates at many major metro papers exceed half the subscriber base. In other words, for every 100,000 subscribers, more than 50,000 cancel every year and have to be replaced (at great marketing expense). Many major dailies now reach only two out of ten households in their own circulation areas. They're not treading water; they're sinking fast.

It's the smaller markets that are solid -- the ones where newspapers are full of the local news that allegedly dumbs down the paper so that it appeals to the hicks in flyover country.

Schafer quotes a study by two economists of the effects on local newspaper circulation when the New York Times enters the market with home delivery. I'd like to see a detailed analysis by age cohort. Perhaps this is just evidence that the New York Times is becoming a specialty newsletter for the elite and elderly.