Hyperlocal News Roundup
by Matt on May 17, 2009 in Industry
I must have a half-dozen items saved up in my feed reader, all related to the latest hyperlocal goings on. So, rather than blabber on about things, let’s just get to it.
I’ve written before about local bloggers getting no respect, and now there’s several related bits to talk about. Cory Bergman writes about the disrespect that Washington state legislators are showing toward blogs lately, with one saying “Anybody who’s blogging, God love ‘em, they can say and do whatever they want, because they have no liability or responsibility for what they say, because they are not held to any standard, and they shouldn’t be — they’re just individuals editorializing, if you will.” Danny Sullivan talks about similar issues in his post, Dammit, I’m A Journalist, Not A Blogger: Time For Online Journalists To Unite?. And David Mihm tackles some of these same blogging vs. journalism themes with his post, The *Apparent* Death of Journalism. All good reads.
One of the potential problems of having local blogs replace larger, well-funded news rooms is the question, Who’ll do the heavy lifting when it comes to deep, investigative reporting? It’s a legitimate question. The Online Journalism Blog recently investigated some of the current efforts that hyperlocal blogs and web sites are making to do deeper reporting.
On the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, Richard Anderson writes about how he’s built a sustainable hyperlocal web site/blogging business model covering four communities in Maine:
Our products enhance each other. Professional journalists report news as it happens on the website. Weekly, this news is contextualized, analyzed and printed in the newspaper. Citizens and businesses post timely news and information online and many of their posts also appear in the paper. And two-thirds of our web sites’ front pages are filled with citizen and business posts. We call them, “Neighbors growing together.” Our community networks are the trusted source of news and views.
On the business side of things, Greg Sterling takes a look at what American Towns is up to — specifically the company’s latest growth and revenue numbers. American Towns recently sent out a news release saying it has the “Highest Traffic of Any Network of Hyper-Local Community Websites.”
On a similar note, Peter Krasilovsky checks in with Outside.In about their company’s growth. How about going from 800,000 unique users in September 2008 to 4.2 million today? That’s pretty good. Peter also reveals that Outside.In has future plans to help local bloggers monetize their work.
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