‘Hyperlocal’ Hits CNN
by Matt on May 5, 2009 in Industry
Again, not strictly blogging-related, but the hyperlocal news movement (that’s been a consistent theme on this blog in the last couple months) was exposed to another huge audience today, thanks to CNN.
The article is pretty familiar to others I’ve mentioned recently. It focuses on the decline of newspapers, and the potential for hyperlocal news coverage to fill at least some of the void.
“Since 2004, when trouble in the news industry started to show, at least 800 community news Web sites have popped up, according to Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. The sites often do a better job at covering community news than large newspapers did, even before the papers started to collapse, she said.”
To be fair, it’s not all a “rah-rah” piece pimping hyperlocal as the solution. There are some legitimate questions raised about what happens when newspapers fail. Even without a mention of hyperlocal blogging, I think it’s still worth reading.
One More Thing: The main impact of this kind of news coverage is that more people are exposed to the word “hyperlocal” and the idea of neighborhood-level content online. When the NY Times did its piece on hyperlocal news, that one was saved on delicious by hundreds of people. This CNN piece has been saved today by dozens of people. Surely some of these are people who weren’t familiar with the hyperlocal concept before, and that’s a Good Thing for local bloggers.
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