Newspapers Put Less Than Half of Hyperlocal News Online
by Matt on Apr 23, 2010 in Industry
Need more evidence of the great opportunity that hyperlocal blogging offers? Consider this study by readMedia involving more than 1,000 community newspaper editors and reporters in the U.S. The summary:
Community newspapers throughout the country consider personalized “hometown” news stories about local residents as “must-publish” content, but more than 50% of it continues to live in print only and not online.
Almost 90% of respondents said they “always do their best” to include local interest stories submitted by college, universities, small businesses, and the military. The survey calls this stuff “hometown news.” And, as the chart below shows, not much of that news makes its way to the papers’ web sites.
The readMedia report suggests this could be either a problem or an opportunity for Web-only hyperlocal sites. But, as I explained last year in Why Local Blogging Works, I think it’s most certainly an opportunity. There’s a door open and if the newspaper isn’t standing there, someone else should walk right in and provide the online hyperlocal news and information that people want.
The full readMedia news release is here.
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3 Responses to “Newspapers Put Less Than Half of Hyperlocal News Online”
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Why would you say they don’t get around to putting up hyperlocal content? I work for a media services company and we’ve actually done some amount of hyperlocal content for two newspapers all the way from India. We’ve even used “observers” based in the community to make this happen in a full-fledged way.
What I have discovered so far with my partnership with a newspaper is that as much as they want to publish hyperlocal, they are still driven by “newsy” type events and articles. They routinely ignore what I consider my bread and butter articles.
I see the Examiner.com really doing a major push to get hyperlocal content online.
If you do a search for blogger/writer jobs on Monster for a lot of major metro areas, you’ll see that the Examiner is trying to collect a massive amount of bloggers to contribute content.
Definitely though, the Examiner would be an exception – most newspaper sites simply do not get online, even here in 2010, half a decade after their top consultants were telling them they needed to really push to integrate better with online.