Hyperlocal News Roundup

newsstandI was on the road this past week, so blogging slowed down — but it goes without saying that hyperlocal news didn’t slow down at the same time. Couple articles below about local coupons and hyperlocal web sites. But if you’re looking for some heated debate, don’t miss the ” Community news sites are not a business yet” piece from Newsosaur. Meanwhile, I’m hoping to pick up the pace again around here.

October 10, 2010 | Filed Under Industry | Leave a Comment 

Hyperlocal News Roundup

newsstandSome good articles in this week’s roundup. I had hoped to blog in some detail about the “What Works For Hyperlocal News Sites” article that’s listed below, but just ran out of time. There’s some good stuff in there, so don’t miss it. Howard Owens of The Batavian wrote a good piece on beating Patch, and I should offer congrats to Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog — one of the finalists named in the first article below about the 2010 Online Journalism Awards. Congrats, TR!

October 3, 2010 | Filed Under Industry | 2 Comments 

Why is Block by Block an Invite-Only Affair?

I’ve just been reading Mel Taylor’s criticism of last week’s Block by Block Community News Summit, along with the responses to that criticism in the comments of his post and, to a lesser degree, from Ben Ilfeld.

Mel watched some of the live streaming from the summit and came away less than impressed with at least one session that he saw. And so the obvious response from organizers has been, basically, that Mel didn’t really experience the summit.

Well, of course he didn’t. Because it’s invitation only.

Why is that, I wonder. It seems odd to me that, in an industry where the conventional wisdom is that hyperlocal news and citizen journalism is an opportunity that’s available to anyone who wants to try, you basically have to be a “someone” to attend (one of?) the industry’s premier educational events. That seems counter-intuitive and contradictory to me.

Perhaps there are excellent reasons for this; I don’t know. But I’d love to. Organizers? Anyone?

(Disclaimer: I must confess that part of my frustration on this topic stems from the fact that I emailed the organizers in early August looking for information and expressing a desire to attend, got a brief reply back that, as I recall, promised more information in a second email … and then never received another email. I understand; we’re all busy. Still doesn’t feel great.)

Postscript: Shortly after posting this, I found this article by Michele McLellan, one of the organizers, discussing the possibility of a future Block by Block conference(s). Attendees have setup various email lists and social networking groups to discuss that possibility. Since I’m not an attendee, I’ll reiterate my suggestion here: Make it open to all. As an “industry,” we need to spread wings as far as possible and reach as many local bloggers and journalists as we can. We need to adopt our own version of Gusteau’s famous advice from Ratatouille and support the idea that “anyone can blog.” And then help them do it.

September 29, 2010 | Filed Under Industry | 2 Comments 

Hyperlocal News Roundup

newsstandAnother big list of links from the last week or so, including a few pieces about the Block by Block conference in Chicago at the end of the week. Was expecting more coverage of that, actually. Maybe it’ll happen during the coming week, since the conference wrapped up on Friday afternoon.

September 26, 2010 | Filed Under Industry | Leave a Comment 

NearSay Curates Hyperlocal News in NYC

NearSay just launched this week with a hyperlocal focus on an already crowded area: New York City. Here’s a look at the home page on this late Friday afternoon:

nearsay

There are already a ton of hyperlocal blogs and news sites covering New York City, but NearSay says it’s taking a different approach — the curation of news from other sources. In an email this week, co-founder Trevor Sumner described NearSay as

“…a mix of curated neighborhood news (hand-picked by our editors) and prominent user contributions (from community members). We are not an aggregator. We are humans who use aggregators and many other sources to hand-select only the best neighborhood news.”

NearSay hits the ground with 80 contributors and their contributions get ranked to determine the site’s most “influential n-siders.” There’s even an influencer leaderboard that can be sorted by topic and/or neighborhood. Interesting. Not an idea that would fly in smaller cities, I’m afraid (my area doesn’t have enough “influencers” to contribute to such a thing, much less be ranked on a leaderboard), but it could work in the Big Apple and other larger cities.

I do like the idea of curating content, and think there’s a lot of value in that approach especially in crowded areas with a lot of content being produced. So, best of luck to the NearSay team. It’ll be interesting to watch how the site fares.

September 24, 2010 | Filed Under Industry | 1 Comment 

Reading Blogs: More Mainstream; Blogging: Not So Much

Some interesting stats out this week from eMarketer about the penetration of both blog reading and blog writing in the U.S. In a blog post earlier this week, eMarketer says more than half of all Internet users in the U.S. will read blogs at least once a month this year. Their forecast says that number will hit 60% by 2014.

blog stats

Blogging, on the other hand, will continue to be the work of the few: eMarketer says about 12% of U.S. Internet users will update a blog at least monthly this year, and only 13.3% by 2014. We’re the minority. Not too surprising, especially with many “regular folks” finding it much easier to maintain a Facebook or Twitter presence and using that for sharing content.

There’s another important distinction to be made, and I’m glad to see it was mentioned in the eMarketer article: Going forward, the distinction between a blog and a web site will be harder to make. It’s already difficult in many cases, and you could argue it’s a completely unneeded distinction. Says eMarketer:

But there is a caveat to this forecast: Over time, blogs will continue to become indistinguishable from other media channels.

I already foresee the day when I need to change the name of this blog you’re reading now. It won’t be Hyperlocal Blogger. It’ll be … something that doesn’t force a distinction on blogging.

September 24, 2010 | Filed Under Blogging, Industry | 2 Comments 

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