Category Archives: Hyperlocal

How new Fourwhere maps plotting Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla could be useful for journalists

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Fourwhere, a location-based search service, first launched a few months ago with data from geolocation gaming service Foursquare. Now it has developed its service to also include data from other location services, Yelp and Gowalla.

The mapping service, launched at the SXSW technology conference in Austin, now has arrangements with Foursquare and Gowalla to allow extra access to information, and says it’s in discussions with Yelp for unrestricted access to its platform.

Fourwhere says it can match different service updates on the same venue, even if the services are not using a standardised naming or location convention. Following the latest update, Cnet’s Josh Lowensohn pointed out a few of the glitches, but also said:

Despite the current shortcomings, I really like the idea of having one place that aggregates not only the tips from these sites, but, more importantly, the check-ins. When done right, and given a sense of time, Fourwhere could prove itself as a very powerful tool for showing what’s hot and what’s not based on a much larger group of users than any of the three services could offer on their own.

I asked Sysomos, the social media monitoring and analytics company behind Fourwhere, how the service would be useful to journalists.

“Fourwhere will make it easy for journalists to see what is going on at certain locations,” says community manager Sheldon Levine. It can provide insight as to what’s going on from the people actually there, he says.

“It can even help them search out locations where something interesting is happening and with story ideas by seeing where people in their markets are, and what they are talking about while there.

“Fourwhere will help connect all kinds of users, from those on the ground to, say journalists, making it easier for everyone to see what’s going on around them.”

I’ve taken a grab to show how it looks for the area around the Journalism.co.uk office in Brighton. Admittedly, some of the updates are out of date by several months, but that’s probably due to low level user-activity. I was briefly excited by the promise of free beer at a local pub, before realising someone had made the comment six months ago.

But, imagine a lot more people were using these services in a concentrated area, with more regular updates. It’s not just the comments: as Paul Bradshaw commented in a post about Foursquare, location based services give you an extra layer of information: frequency of visits etc.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Fourwhere, and on Twitter’s development of Twitter Places, which will also be integrated with Foursquare and Gowalla.

As more people embrace these location-based services and use them more creatively, the more useful they could become for journalists.

On Friday, at Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired event Yelp’s head of European community management, Miriam Warren, will be talking about mobile and the development of Yelp’s online review service.

Yelp, which now attracts over 32 million monthly unique visitors to its online reviews, has recently developed new version of the Yelp iPhone app: when a user checks-in to a combination of businesses, they will be able to earn “Yelp Badges”. More details at this link.

Publishers who offer similar review or local information services might be interested to see what and how Yelp is developing, while news journalists might consider how they could use Yelp and other location-based products to feed their stories and make contacts.

Future of news innovation in the US is coming from outside of journalism

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Martin Moore is director of the Media Standards Trust. This post first appeared on his blog.

Last week’s Future of News and Civic Media conference organised by the Knight Foundation in Boston (#fncm) was that rare thing – a #futureofnews conference where I came away feeling quite inspired and with a renewed optimism about the future of news (though not as we’ve known it).

In particular, I learnt that there are growing numbers of people in the States who have moved beyond the increasingly circular debates about how to sustain the incumbent news industry. Instead, they are working on lots of projects that use the internet and mobile to provide the public with timely information, in an accessible way. In other words, deliver what journalism did – or was meant to – deliver, without calling it journalism.

Take, for example, this year’s Knight News Challenge Winners (of which Paul Bradshaw tweeted “Very impressed… easily the strongest year yet”). Only one of the twelve winners is directly focused on addressing the travails of the existing news industry – and even this in a very non-traditional way. PRX StoryMarket will provide a way for the public to pitch and pay for news stories on US public radio. It is based on the ‘spot.us‘ model (a Knight winner in 2008), but focused on radio.

Nine others (making up over 80 per cent of the prize in terms of funding) are about enabling and enhancing information flows within communities and hardly mention the word ‘journalism’.

Citytracking will “make municipal data easy to understand with software that allows the users to transform web data into maps and graphics” (by the renowned Stamen Design – see this map for example).

The Cartoonist will create a free tool that allows people to produce cartoon-like current event games

Local wiki will “help people learn and share community news and knowledge through the creation of local wikis”. The two young guys who won the award started a local wiki in Davis, California six years ago which has grown to be the biggest media source in the town.

GoMap Riga will “inspire residents to become engaged in their community by creating an online map where people can browse and post their own local news and information”. Again, this is about people – the community – putting up and reading content about their neighbourhood (run by a tremendous Latvian duo – Kristofs Blaus and Marcis Rubenis).

Front Porch Forum will help residents connect with “their community by creating open-source software for neighbourhood news”. Essentially micro local private sites based around a handful of blocks.

Stroome allows people to edit video online, for free, within their browser.

CitySeed will ‘develop mobile applications that enable people to geotag ideas for improving neighbourhoods’. The example they give is of someone geotagging a location for a community garden.

Tilemapping will enable residents to ‘learn about local issues by creating a set of easy-to-use tools for crafting hyperlocal maps’.

WindyCitizen’s real time ads will ‘help online start-ups generate revenue and become sustainable by creating enhanced software that produce real-time ads’. This may well help journalists and the news industry, but notice there’s no mention of news outlets, just ‘online start-ups’.

Of the final two, one enhances traditional reporting (Order in the Court 2.0), and the other will use social media to report on a US battalion in Afghanistan (One-Eight).

And it wasn’t just the Knight News Challenge winners that eschewed traditional ideas of journalism. Most of the conference was spent talking about new media tools that served a public purpose – or “civic media” as its termed in the US. News is a part of this, but only in the sense that there is a public value to news.

We saw a demo by SourceMap – a site that helps you map where things come from and what they are made of; and of boy.co.tt – a site that makes consumer boycotts much more targeted. We were introduced to streetblogs – a ‘daily news source, online community and political mobilizer for the Livable Streets movement’; seeclickfix – like MySociety’s fixmystreet; transparencydata.com from the Sunlight Foundation; groundcrew.us – that uses GPS and mobile communication to coordinate volunteering, events, political canvassing etc.; and many other sites and services that enhance communication, focus citizen activism, bring people closer to public authorities, and fulfil those perennial twin goals of greater transparency and accountability.

There is lots of development already being done in the US with public data. In Boston, the release of real time transport data by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) in November 2009 generated a slew of creative hacking (see this Wall Street Journal piece). The same is now happening in New York. There is also an open wiki for helping collaboration and gathering best practice at http://wiki.openmuni.org/.

Much of the new development is emerging from US universities, such as MIT. At the MIT Media Lab’s Center for the Future of Civic Media, for example. It defines civic media as “any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting”.

We in the UK are now expecting ‘a tsunami of data’ to flow from government thanks to the Big Society declaration (including a new ‘right to data’). Some people have begun using the data for development – such as the live train map for the London underground. But it is well worth casting our eyes across the Atlantic – we can learn alot from current developments in the US.

Treasury reaches out to hyperlocal sites for Budget coverage

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For today’s Budget, HM Treasury is making an effort to talk directly to local news bloggers about potential coverage.

As VentnorBlog, based in the Isle of Wight, reports:

…Rather than just rely on ‘traditional’ media, they [HM Treasury] want to innovate and extend their reach to distribute the information as widely as possible. They want VentnorBlog to help Island readers understand the details as soon as it’s been announced.

Information will be available on the Treasury’s website after the Chancellor’s announcements, but the department will also issue some bloggers with regional press notices and resources at the same time it goes to the news wires.

The Treasury asked hyperlocal publisher and trainer Will Perrin to put them in touch with some leading local blogs. Perrin told Journalism.co.uk that the Treasury’s interest is a “good thing” that will “no doubt be experimental for both parties”. “It’s a real challenge for a national institution to localise their message, but you have to start somewhere.”

Hyperlocal wars: commenters defend online local news sites

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As my colleague Laura mentioned in a news article earlier today, a blog post on the Manchester Evening News’ website by chief reporter David Ottewell, written in defence of the Salford Star, raises concerns about new hyperlocal sites. An extract:

There is a lot of talk these days about ‘hyperlocal’ sites. The idea is that journalists working in a small community can cover stories that might get lost at, say, a regional or local level.

Too often, though, these sites disappoint. They end up simply regurgitating press releases, or ripping off stories from local newspapers, because they are one-man bands run by amateurs who don’t have the time, resources, or sometimes skills to dig out the news.

As Ottewell probably could have anticipated, this has sparked off some lively and heated comment. Hyperlocal trainer and publisher Will Perrin answers with examples of his favourite local news sites. Philip John, the developer behind Journal Local and the Lichfield Blog, raises an important point about future collaboration with Trinity Mirror (something Trinity Mirror’s head of regional multimedia David Higgerson talked about at the recent Polis/BBC College of Journalism conference):

We are also now actively talking with Trinity Mirror publications about collaboration and I know we’re not the only ones. I mention it specifically because they’re your ‘sisters’ within the TM family now and you might want to ask why they are so openly embracing hyperlocal.

Nigel Barlow, the co-founder of the Manchester site InsidetheM60 also responds, inviting Ottewell to further discuss these issues:

The spirit of your blog is not really in the best interests of what David Higgerson has for some time been promoting as cooperation between the main stream media and the Independents.

You have to recognise that there are some endemic problems within the media industry which local and regional papers seem to be bearing the brunt of. Not all their fault I accept but stances like yours do not help. Attack is not always the best form of defence but I take heart from the fact that you notice us. If we weren’t on your radar then surely we would be of no concern to you.

Sarah Hartley, who formerly worked at the MEN and now edits Guardian Local, says:

…your (probably) link bait assertion about what hyperlocal sites do ‘too often’ shouldn’t be left unchallenged. There’s heaps of sites up and down the country doing the sort of scrutiny you should applaud and unearthing stories of genuine importance to their communities – and that’s the point ‘their communities’. Maybe those stories don’t appeal to your professionalised view of journalism? I know not. Rather than generalise about these sites, perhaps some credit where it’s due and then name names if you have examples where churnalism is going on rather than tarring everyone with the same brush.

It has generated commentary away from the MEN site too; Philip John has a link round-up here.

Next Generation Journalist: how to make hyperlocal work

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This series of 10 moneymaking tips for journalists began on Adam Westbrook’s blog, but continues exclusively on Journalism.co.uk from today. Adam’s e-book, Next Generation Journalist: 10 New Ways to Make Money in Journalism will be available to download in full on 20 May.

08. set up a hyperlocal website

OK, so setting up a hyperlocal blog is hardly a new way to do things in journalism. But making money from it is pretty new and, seemingly, still pretty rare.

In the UK for example, only a handful of hyperlocal blogs, such as Ventor Blog, SR2 and SE1 are getting the sorts of eyeballs and ad revenue to make a living.

Thing is, hyperlocal is an important and (if done correctly) profitable niche for the next generation journalist; we’re just not going about it right.

Setting up a blog, writing loads of local content and hoping to bring in local ad revenue alone is a tough gig. At first you’re unlikely to get the hits you need to bring in enough cash. Google Adwords is becoming something of a byword for false promises of cash among website owners.

If you want to maximise your advertising revenue, a product like Addiply is a really good bet, and is it seems to be bringing in better results for those who use it on a local level. Advertisers could expect to pay around £30 a month, although it varies from site to site.

But I really think for a hyperlocal website to work – in fact, for any web based content product to work – the ultimate aim must be to make ad revenue as small a slice of the pie as possible.

The less your business relies on ad revenue, the less vulnerable you are to the inevitable ups and downs of the market.

Other ways to make hyperlocal work

Have a look at yesterday’s post on my blog, where I talk about a local news success story – thebusinessdesk.com.  Set up by David Parkin, it now has three regional business sites in Yorkshire, the North-West and Birmingham.

Parkin told last week’s Local Heroes Conference he expects to turnover £1 million this year.

Where does the money come from? Ad revenue yes, but that’s only a part of it. Firstly, thebusinessdesk.com has a niche (local financial news) and a wealthy target audience (business people).

It has a mailing list of 37,000 subscribers who get a daily email of business news, which is sponsored. They have an iPhone app and run events.

It’s a successful model – and one which needs to be employed by hyperlocal bloggers. Don’t just process listings, and re-write press releases; become a major part of your community. Become a leader in your community.

Be the voice for those whose voices don’t get heard. Run regular events so you can meet readers face-to-face. Run pub quizzes and pocket the profits.  Sell products, take a slice of restaurant bookings through your website, charge for listings. Don’t just maintain a website – build a mailing list and send them news direct to their inbox. Get that mailing list sponsored by local businesses.

If you’ve got any good stories about how you’re making hyperlocal work, I’d love to hear them.

Interested in niche and hyperlocal? Looking for new ideas for specialist journalism? Attend Journalism.co.uk’s upcoming event: news:rewired – the nouveau niche. Follow the link to find out more.