Last week, the Wall Street Journal had a story about Loudonextra.com, a hyperlocal enterprise of the Washington Post that covers an affluent suburban county. A project of the hyperlocal guru behind Naples Daily News and Lawrence Journal-World, Rob Curley, the site started about a year ago in hopes of harnessing the power of citizen-publishing and relevant content that would draw readers. It included all the latest great ways to organize and present information: an organized calendar of events, databases, maps, links to community blogs.
But as the WSJ pointed out, the audience never developed.
Sure, there were things they could have done better with the site as it is. Better promotion on Washingtonpost.com, better grassroots promotion by attending community meetings would have helped, the creator acknowledged in his blog post about the story. But it seems that the site overlooks a key question in the success of hyperlocal initiatives. Is local news boring?
It sure can be.
The more local the news is, the odds are it’s less newsworthy to everyone else. On our list of things that make a story newsworthy, proximity is just one. So if we weigh that one far more than the others, it will become less interesting to the general public. I think the best way to understand the way that hyperlocal does and doesn’t work is through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. You might not think of them as news Web sites, but they are in the broadened sense that the Internet allows. A couple years ago, Facebook introduced the “news feed,” a listing on Facebook users’ home page that updates them with “stories” about what’s going on with their friends. Candy changed her profile picture. John posted a link. Courtney changed her location. Perhaps the word to describe this news isn’t local, but personal. Still, it can be the same thing for newspapers. The idea is that the more specific the news is, the more it will interest people. But this only works if people know one another. There’s nothing that would bore me more than a stranger’s baby pictures. But a friend’s baby pictures will give me pause.
I don’t see a lot of potential in the hyperlocal push without networking. We should harness the public’s desire to self-publish to get users that interact with our web sites. Eventually, I’d like to see people have profiles on newspaper web sites, where they can advertise things they’re selling through newspaper classifieds, invite people to events on the newspaper’s calendar and follow their friends’ comments on stories. The Internet has been a great forum for narcissism. And it’s broken down the sometimes false authority of traditional media. If we’re willing to dip our toe into that water, with comments on stories, for example, we should jump right in.
Filed under: hyperlocal
