Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Hyperlocal

#polcasm: Policing 2.0 – citizens and social media

Judith Townend — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:41:23 +0000

Now this is an agenda worth looking at: the NPIA Citizen Focus and Neighbourhood Policing Programme is holding a conference in Coventry (the journalistic place to be in October Journalism.co.uk can vouch) today on ‘Policing 2.0: the citizen and social media’. The introductory document can be found at this link. Among the attendees are hyperlocal pioneers Will Perrin (@willperrin) and Nicky Getgood (@getgood).

Follow tweets here, and Journalism.co.uk will follow up on what was said later:

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Lost Remote: Google’s new simplified ads for local businesses

Judith Townend — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:31:12 +0000

Local advertising: Google has introduced new simplified ads for local businesses in the US, reports Lost Remote. Full story at this link…

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PDA: Talkaboutlocal’s hyperlocal ‘unconference’

Laura Oliver — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:25:42 +0000

Great post from Sarah Hartley rounding up the potential for hyperlocal online ventures to revive and supplement local news coverage with examples from delegates at Talk About Local’s first unconference

Full post at this link…

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paidContent:UK: Interview and update on Northcliffe’s hyperlocal sites

Laura Oliver — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:18:02 +0000

Following the launch of its Local People network in July, paidContent:UK talks to Associated Northcliffe Digital’s Roland Bryan about developments with the sites and the group’s expectations for revenue.

The network’s success will be reviewed over the next 2-3 months, says Bryan, who is confident the sites will make money – a slice of the UK’s local ad market, which he values at £2.8 billion.

Despite not being set up as citizen journalism/user-generated news sites, Bryan says contributing news items has been popular with users with around 12 stories feeding back in Northcliffe’s local papers.

Full post at this link…

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Lost Remote: ‘Hyperlocal’ is not everything local

Judith Townend — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:53:28 +0000

A blog post that examines the buzzword ‘hyperlocal’. Lost Remote’s Cory Bergman argues that its use should be restricted to describe coverage more local than ‘local’. The Fast Company’s headline refererring to the ‘$100 billion potential of hyperlocal news’ particularly irks him.

“If you cover a city or a town, you’re a local site. Hyperlocal is a subset of local, not the catch-all buzzword for all of it (which explains the $100 billion number.) And slapping a garage sale map on a city news site does not make it hyperlocal.”

Full post at this link…

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Nutshell.org.uk: A new directory for local blogs

Laura Oliver — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:58:49 +0000

Following on from plans to map and identify ultralocal UK blogs and websites, Matt Wardman has started a new directory for local blogs, Nutshell.

It will feature:

Sites focused on a defined and identified area or community.
Sites edited and controlled from within that area or community.
Sites which are editorially independent.

For more information or to submit a blog visit Nutshell.org.uk.

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Loudoun Independent: Washington Post pulling plug on hyperlocal site in Loudoun

Judith Townend — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:11:20 +0000

The Washington Post is pulling the plug on its hyperlocal site, the Loudoun Extra, two years after launch, reports the Loudoun Independent.

“While the Washington Post remains dedicated to maintaining a high level of coverage of the counties surrounding Washington, D.C., we found that our experiment with LoudounExtra.com as a separate site was not a sustainable model,” said Kris Coratti, the Post’s director of communications.

Full post at this link…

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Online Journalism Blog: Help map local blogs in the UK

Laura Oliver — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:03:53 +0000

A call to action on behalf of the Online Journalism Blog, which with the help of Matt Wardman, is attempting to build a map of locally-focused blogs in the UK.

You can submit the name of any local blogs you know of via an online form.

Matt has some interesting thoughts on the opportunities for local news blogs in this post too.

“I think group blogs with varied teams of contributors may be best placed to provide a decent level of coverage and draw a good readership, while competing effectively with other media outlets. That is a trend we have seen in the political blog niche over several years – the sites which have established themselves and maintain a position as key sites have developed progressively larger teams of editors, and provided a wider range of commentary and services,” he suggests.

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Telegraph.co.uk: MSN discussing hyperlocal partnerships with local papers

Laura Oliver — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:56:03 +0000

Microsoft has been very chatty this week – see its long-awaited announcement of a search partnership with Yahoo.

On top of this and following the launch of the data-rich MSN Local, MSN executive producer Peter Bale told the Telegraph that the site was hoping to take feeds from local newspapers and map the content.

“Hyperlocal news online has never been more important and we think this is a really interesting growth area,” he said.

Payment for the feeds is a possibility or a linking/traffic driving arrangement could be made, he added.

Full post at this link…

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Jon Bernstein on hyperlocal: Five steps to kick-start the local news revolution

Jon Bernstein — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:51:03 +0000

The strength of hyperlocal is also its weakness – disparate projects in far-flung places.

But here’s the thing. What works in KW1 – the business model, the editorial proposition – is likely to work just as well in TR19.*

So we have a choice. Wait for exemplars of the form to rise up, then copy and adapt, or give the whole process a hand by collating, sharing, talking and learning. Right now.

Let’s do the latter. Here’s a quick and dirty call to action:

1. Find out what’s out there
In the United States they are doing just that.

The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism has invited ‘bloggers, independent journalists, website publishers and entrepreneurs’ to complete a survey so it can ‘gather information and innovative ideas from across the country’.

“We want to bring facts, figures, and business analysis to the debate over the future of journalism,” it states.

Where’s the equivalent effort over here?

I’m told that there are voices in Ofcom, the media regulator, who want to collate information about all of the little community newsletters and bigger sites which could now be called hyperlocal.

If that’s the case, it’s time to get moving. Oh, and we’ll have some of that US data when it’s ready, too.

2. Share ideas
Good practice, sound business models, strong feature strands and story hooks are not geographically-defined. So share, feed off each other, beg, borrow and steal.

Talk About Local is a good start. More, please.

3. Share resources
Can you apply the franchise model to the hyperlocal? For some the answer is a definite yes.

Again Talk About Local offers a possible lead with its plan to seed 150 sites in deprived areas nationwide.

Paul Bradshaw and Nick Booth’s Help me Investigate, is another service with franchise potential.

As is Mapumental.

This is a MySociety.org concoction and, like Help me Investigate, is a recipient of 4iP seed funding. Mapumental is postcode-based tool that brings together publicly available local house price and transport data and mashes it up with a ’scenicness’ rating .

MySociety is also responsible for FixMyStreet. Both are centrally-built pieces of software with a hyperlocal application.

Integration is the key.

4. Share content
Like franchising, syndication is another old media model that has a home in the brave new world of hyperlocal.

And there is a commercial opportunity for those who create usable aggregation models.

Take Outside.in which has just launched a service in the United States it claims ‘will allow users to quickly create a mass amount of hyperlocal news pages’.

Outside.in is coming to the UK, but why isn’t a UK start-up doing this for the UK market? Perhaps one is. Time to make some noise.

5. Engage government
There’s a crisis in the public service provision of local news. If you want proof just look at the horse-trading between ITV and Ofcom. It’s a perfect opportunity for the government to think laterally.

Yet despite the warm words – and suitable use of new media lingua franca – in last month’s Digital Britain report, Lord Carter and co failed to put anything radical in train.

Carter’s defence is that this report was a sprawling undertaking and wasn’t designed to mandate government.

If so, someone needs to pick it up in Whitehall, but also in county halls up and down the country.

Rather than fund me-too freesheets that threaten to kill off local newspapers, local authorities would be better advised to help provide the infrastructure for hyperlocal.

It’s time to free your data for postcode-based applications, create a support system for local citizen journalists and use those soon-to-be-thriving platforms to promote the uptake of online public services.

Enough of the action plan. Go create.

(*That’s John O’Groats to Land’s End, postcode fans. Well, near enough.)

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.

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