UK Papers Going Hyperlocal, Too
It’s not just US papers that are going hyperlocal (see NY Times and Seattle P-I).
Editors Weblog wrote about Newsquest, a UK-based newspaper publishing company that’s launching hyperlocal sites for seven newspapers and recruiting “citizen journalists” to write news and possibly provide video and audio in the future, too.
They’ve started with 24 hyperlocal sites under the auspices of the Kidderminster Shuttle newspaper. You can see the 24 here.
The takeaway for me, whether it’s UK papers or US papers or wherever, is this: There’s no better time than the present to start a hyperlocal blog. If you don’t do it, someone else will.
More on Twitter & Hyperlocal Content
If you enjoyed my How to Use Twitter to Find Local Blog Content post from a couple weeks back, you may also want to check out this post from the Hyperlocal 101 blog:
It mentions more than just the ones I had in my article here on HLB and talks about the idea of using Twitter for user-generated content.
A little Hyperlocal at ad:tech
I spoke last week at the big ad:tech conference down in San Francisco — my first time ever attending an ad:tech, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to see HelloMetro.com pushing the hyperlocal concept to a crowd that was rumored to be in the 10,000 +/- range. Don’t know how many of those folks were even familiar with the term, but they were introduced to it if they walked past the HelloMetro.com booth on the main expo floor.
Not familiar with HelloMetro.com? I mentioned them briefly in Everyone’s Getting the Hyperlocal Religion — they have a network of city guide web sites that, according to their marketing brochure, covers 1,500 cities, 35,000 neighborhoods, and 50,000 zip codes. Examples include HelloSeattle.com, HelloAtlanta.com, and even a couple in my small-town slice of life — HelloRichland.com and HelloKennewick.com.
One of their recent pushes has been to hire writers to help create new content — usually in the form of restaurant reviews and event recaps, things like that. (Here’s an example of a local restaurant review from HelloAtlanta.com.) I don’t know what the pay is, but the money is the only tangible benefit to being a HelloMetro.com writer. They don’t create author profile pages, so it’s not a way to get some additional exposure and/or a link for your local blog. Maybe someday that’ll change.
Regardless, it was good to see a little “hyperlocal” at ad:tech last week.
Hyperlocal News Roundup
Has it really been 12 days since I’ve posted? Yikes. Well, some travel and some personal stuff keeping me busy – those are my excuses. I think I have a couple posts tonight, starting with this quick look at some interesting hyperlocal news/links.
On PBS Mediashift, Mark Glaser takes a look at :local watchdog news sites — hyperlocal news sites that he says are mainly run by former print journalists. There’s about a dozen examples of sites in the US and Canada, and covering big cities (Chicago, San Francisco) and small (Gross Pointe, MI). If covering local news is part of your hyperlocal blogging routine, I guarantee you’ll get something out of this list. Oh, and there are some more listed in the comments.
Hyperlocal journalism was even featured on NPR earlier this month – how about that!? The segment asks, Is hyper-local online reporting the future of journalism? (My answer: It’s certainly PART of the future, but hopefully not the only part.)
And finally, UK-based local blogger Ed Walker shares how he set up a community news blog for his hometown. He talks about the time commitment, the need to reach out and meet local people, using Twitter, and more. Whether you’re just starting out yourself, or if you’ve been local blogging for a while now, you’ll identify with his experience.
Your turn: What hyperlocal news/blog posts did I miss recently? Share links in the comments.
Speaking of local blogging…Placeblogger’s Lisa Williams
The big NY Times piece on hyperlocal blogs yesterday prompted Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab to repost an old video (as in, about 6 months ago) they did with Placeblogger’s Lisa Williams.
After watching the video myself (and since I’m still waiting for Lisa’s guest blog post … ahem!), I’m prompted to share the video here on HLB. It’s only about four minutes long, so no excuse not to watch. You’ll like it. Good stuff about Lisa’s own local blog, H2Otown, and about local blogging in general.
Local Bloggers are Getting No Respect
One thing I didn’t mention (purposely) in last night’s post about the NY Times article was the inclusion of a little jab directed at bloggers in general, and local bloggers specifically. You may have caught it near the end of the article:
One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content. The information on many of these sites can still appear woefully incomplete. Crime reports on EveryBlock, for example, are short on details of what happened. Links to professionally written news articles on Outside.in are mixed with trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts.
That raises the question of what these hyperlocal sites will do if newspapers, a main source of credible information, go out of business. “They rely on pulling data from other sources, so they really can’t function if news organizations disappear,” said Steve Outing, who writes about online media for Editor & Publisher Online.
Inherent in those two paragraphs is this idea that there’s some kind of separation between so-called “professionally written news” and what local news blogs are doing. The Times writer, in the first paragraph, mentions that these are “trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts.”
This Just In: Professionally written news articles are also sometimes trivial and irrelevant. This isn’t just a blogging thing. But that’s an attitude that continues to thrive in some traditional media circles.
The JTA, a Jewish news organization, got itself in some hot water recently for sending out a fundraising letter that said this:
“Without a strong JTA, the storytelling will be left to bloggers, twitterers and non-professionals. Is this the best way for our future Jewish stories to be told and recorded?”
Yikes. That comment led to all kinds of backlash among Jewish bloggers and eventually led to an apology from the JTA. You can read more about the controversy at Forward.com.
All of this is to be expected to some degree. Local blogging is still in its infancy, despite the success of the big local blog networks (like Gothamist). And with traditional media on the decline, it’s natural that they’ll take potshots at one of the news sources that stands to replace them. But just because it’s expected, doesn’t make it okay. Local news bloggers need to stand up and show that they deserve respect as legitimate sources of local information.
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