Hyperlocal: it's about content, not technology

Along with "citizen journalism" (previously) comes "hyperlocal," a term referring to coverage of news so local it tends to be below the radar of most media. Hyperlocal news and information is very place-specific (perhaps geo-tagged to enhance location-based searches), and it includes a huge, almost unlimited, potential amount of information—think of expansive reportage (rather than just highlights) of town council and commission meetings, play-by-plays of Little League games, street repairs, police, fire and ambulance logs, and much more.

Some newspaper groups have taken up the term to encourage their editors to move toward more hyperlocal content. In small markets, that means "doing more of what we've always done, and what we know best" in metro markets, it means carving the market up into neighborhoods and making news accessible on that level. And in many cases, it means trying to bring the "citizen journalists" or "citizen bloggers" into a gee-whiz high-tech platform, with seriously mixed results. Here's a little survey of attempts, large and small:

The Dallas Morning News operates neighborsgo, a site that purports to cover a slew of separate neighborhoods (listed in the search pulldown). Strangely, there's no Morning News branding on the site. The top story of the moment seems to be about elementary school students who collect boxtops for some unspecified reason (although a moment later upon revisiting, I can't locate it anymore; the site's navigation is mighty perplexing for a geezer like me). For all of Dallas, today there are only 9 new news items. Pick a random neighborhood, and the top story is probably days old. Looks like a failed experiment, to me.

The Washington Post has tried this with LoudonExtra, a flashy site launched over the summer and immediately critiqued in the Wall Street Journal (see quotes and further commentary by Jon Talton). The Post is still trying, but as Jon says, "The geeks hired by the Post had not a clue about Loudoun." And further:

The failure has been the business model, not real journalism. Technology can enhance news coverage; it can't substitute for serious reporting and great writing. Yet year after year, publishers did a beat-down on newsrooms to fix a problem outside their control. They did nothing to market their products or recruit the world-class talent to fix the ad meltdown. Such is the consequence of an industry that had created monopolies and thought the confiscatory ad-rate cash would never stop flooding in the door.

The tech-heavy business model of some of these attempts also explains the rather spectacular failure of Backfence.com. Visit the URL today and you'll encounter some kind of directory enterprise in the making. But the original idea, backed by around $3 million in venture capital, was to be a network of city-centered sites with citizen journalists gathering and posting news, and local salespeople generating ad revenue. A review of the operation posted in 2005 points to some of the problems even then apparent: "Something feels very incomplete about the experience of using it: I have to believe there’s more to Reston, McLean and Bethesda than what the sites suggest is there to be filled in." After the demise, co-founder and "recovering journalist" Mark Potts posted a detailed list of lessons learned, including:

Engage the community. This may be the single most critical element. It's not about technology, it's not about journalism, it's not about whizbang Web 2.0 features. It's about bringing community members together to share what they know about what's going on around town. A top-down, "if you build it, they will come" strategy absolutely does not work, and that's not what Backfence did—otherwise, we'd have launched in a lot more than 13 communities in two years.

I would argue that for this very reason, it's actually impossible to build a nationally branded network of hyperlocal sites. Unless, perhaps, you've got $3 billion, not $3 million, to play with.

So let's look at a few really local sites—not created in some desperation by metro market papers, not VC-funded attempts to launch a national hyperlocal franchise.

One that gets a fair share of attention ("#1 placeblog in America," for instance) and has been around for a while is Baristanet, covering Montclair, N. J. and environs. My opinion: very clean, very professional in its coverage, looks healthy, adwise (although no clue as to profitability).

Near the other end of the spectrum, in my book, is iBrattleboro, of Brattleboro, Vermont—also once hyped as a good model for citizen journalism, but unfortunately it has fallen into a rut. There have been no site improvements in a long while; most of the posts and discussion seem to be the same folks talking to each other; there's no real focus and no comprehensive coverage. The site's laudable idea of a local wiki has become mostly a local history resource and hasn't reached its potential.

Then there's Village Soup, covering a stretch of the Maine coast. Founder Richard Anderson has toiled for about 10 years building this operation, investing millions of his own dollars, launching several weekly print newspapers to help it compete against a slew of other daily, weekly and niche publications in the area. This year he bought out his struggling weekly competitors, and with the help of a Knight Foundation Newschallenge grant, is having his content management system rewritten as open-source software, with the hope that Village Soups will start simmering in many other locations. Village Soup demonstrates that when it comes to hyperlocal, there are no easy solutions—but their success shows that web-centered local journalism can work where traditional print-centered media were failing. Technology is an important component at Village Soup, but the focus is rightly on content. I'll be looking further, in upcoming posts, at local news enterprises of this kind.
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By the way:
If anyone still needs convincing that print newspapers will lose the race to online, read David Weir's BNet piece "The Tipping Point Toward New Media:"

In almost every article you’ll read on the topic, it’s noted that newspapers still collect more ad revenue than do digital media. AdAge estimates that in 2008 newspaper ad revenue will drop 7.7% to $41.9 billion, while internet and mobile ad revenue will grow 20.9% to $26.6 billion, based on forecasts by Price Waterhouse Coopers. It is worth noting that if these trends continue, digital ad revenue will pass newspapers before the end of 2010.

Aux armes, citoyens!

Citizen journalism. Sounds like a wonderful idea, doesn't it, sort of like citizen soldiers—which originally meant citizens who armed themselves and formed militias to rid themselves of tyrants like George III (who had stationed an army of non-citizen soldiers among them). So, with citizen journalists, we can rid ourselves of the yoke of oppression imposed by media barons and non-citizen journalists, right?

Well, first, let's define what's meant by citizen journalism. To me a citizen journalist is anyone who, unencumbered by professional journalism training or experience, reports news (as text, photo, audio or video, and including fact-checkers and others focused on reporting facts).

To some, citizen journalism seems to be more or less synonymous with blogging, which it is not. Blogging covers a wide spectrum that includes "citizens" practicing "journalism" or publishing "news," but it also covers news aggregators just posting links, folks like me posting opinions, and lots of people posting online what they used to put in a private journal, corporations blogging to market their stuff, politicians selling themselves, communities like Metafilter, and special-interest blogs on a myriad of topics.

At the same time, the term "citizen journalism" includes not only non-professional reporters covering news, but also non-professional aggregators like Drudge, collaborative news sites like Slashdot, and the kind of bloggers who fact-check and occasionally trip up politicians and mainstream media.

So, some bloggers are citizen journalists, and some citizen journalists are bloggers, but the two circles are more distinct than overlapping.

I'm agnostic on whether citizen journalism is legitimate journalism. As conveyed in the first paragraph of this post, the term itself seems a little pretentious to me, and in the few convocations of citizen journalists I've attended, there really does seem to be a perception that the oppressors of mainstream media are in cahoots with the ruling class and need to be overthrown.

The citizen journalists I've met are mostly deaf to any suggestion that most professional journalists toiling in the mainstream are serious, committed and ethical, and that even some of the owners are motivated at least in part by ideals rather than money. And they tend to have an agenda, often expressed as "democracy," but tending to be strongly left-leaning—not that there's anything wrong with left-leaning, I lean that way myself. But I prefer my journalists straight up, not leaning.

I like (here's another oldie but goodie) Doug McGill's 2006 essay entitled "What I've Learned Teaching Citizen Journalists." Those lessons in brief are (you can follow the link for further exposition), quote:

1. Citizens are an untapped source of expertise and positive civic energy that journalists can help unlock.
2. There is no substitute for a strong, independent, institutional journalism.
3. Citizens can help journalists reconnect to the wellsprings of their craft.
4. Journalists need to learn citizenship skills, as much as citizens need to learn journalism.
5. A good citizen journalism class, like a great newspaper, allows for all types of expression -- artistic, poetic, literary, photographic, musical, comical and fun.
6. Citizens create vital community consciousness through the discipline of writing journalistically.
7. I'm the one who needs to change.

Meaning by that last one, that the pros need to loosen up, there's much to be learned from the involvement of citizens in the news process. And of course, since McGill derived these thoughts from teaching citizen journalism, it follows that his pupils were already at least one step on the road to becoming pros, rather than "citizens." But it doesn't seem like, at that time, McGill was ready to turn the store over to them; rather, citizen journalists, with some training, can nicely augment what he calls "institutional" journalists in a news organization.

Now, much has happened since that was written, so, up next (maybe tomorrow), I'm going to continue the citizen journalism theme by having a look at the "hyperlocal" trend, and ask whether, and how, citizen journalism can contribute to hyperlocal news ventures. And, I'm scouting around to see whether this has been done with any notable success.

Let the professionals handle it?

Do we still need professional journalists? Or can "citizen journalists" do a better job?

Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, in a column entitled "Why Journalism Wins My Vote," comes down on the side of professionals, while drawing a series of interesting contrasts between the U.S. and British styles of journalism:

In the new world of citizen journalism, the role of the trained journalist as trusted intermediary no longer holds. Some may argue that this privileged status was always precarious, even a fiction. Perhaps there is no such thing as a neutral filter or objective truth, and (print) journalists were imposters to suggest as much.

Yet to abandon the quest to write the first draft of history carries risks. There will always be powerful forces seeking to suppress injustice or inconvenient truths. For all their failings, newspapers, especially the well-financed family-owned newspapers, have served as a counterweight. On both sides of the Atlantic, the line between news reporting and comment is becoming increasingly blurred. That is something that should give everyone in the profession pause for thought.

Barber also suggests (after opining that "It would be premature to suggest US newspapers are engaged in a last roll of the dice") the kind of opportunity that exists for the American news business to re-invent and re-invigorate itself:

There are plenty of opportunities for growth, starting with a renewed focus on local news; a more sophisticated blend of online and print content; and a more adventurous approach to what readers and viewers want, particularly younger ones.

Unfortunately, American newspaper companies are paying lip service to this formula, but they're not wholeheartedly embracing it. Layoffs and buyouts everywhere ("11,683+") run completely counter to "a renewed focus on local news;" nearly all newspapers still operate on a production cycle aimed at the next printing deadline, rather than "a sophisticated blend of online and print" where online comes first; and for a "more adventurous approach," you need to go to The Huffington Post, not a daily newspaper site.

But we digress. Barber's preference for professional journalism is laid out largely in contrast to bloggers, whom he equates at one point with "citizen journalists." There's probably no clear distinction, really, between the pros, the bloggers, and citizen journalists—on that spectrum you can find professionals who blog, bloggers who report, and even citizens who do a professional job of covering events. I'll revisit that question in the next couple of days with a look specifically at the notion of "citizen journalists" and how they might, or might not, contribute to professional news organizations.