Gray Lady Takes the Local: Inside the NYT’s Hyperlocal Efforts

Stretfight reporting:Like many major media companies that have tried to go hyperlocal, the New York Times’ efforts at small-scale online journalism have been notably mixed. Its main initiative in recent years, The Local, (several small blogs focused on a couple of towns in New Jersey and the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn), launched in 2009 as a section of NYTimes.com, staffed by professional journalists. Due to financial cuts, in January 2010, the blogs changed management, and lost their Times staffers. Baristanet took over the New Jersey outlets, CUNY’s j-school oversees the Fort Greene Local, and NYU’s journalism program handles a subsequently launched East Village version. The blogs are still affiliated with the Times.
Mary Ann Giordano, an editor who oversaw the Times’ recent forays into hyperlocal, continues to provide suggestions and work with the editors of The Local. Over the past year, however, she has spent most of her time focusing on SchoolBook, an ambitious effort to use data and community input to create a conversation space and resource for the New York school system. SchoolBook — like the several Local sites before it — is an experiment. But the important thing is that the Times is willing to take a risk.
Street Fight spoke with Giordano about the past, present, and future of the Times’ hyperlocal efforts; her hopes for Patch; and why the Times is in the hyperlocal game “from a distance.”
How have the Times’ recent hyperlocal efforts gone, particularly as regards The Locals?
We did pretty well in getting things going. People really liked the idea of a news source. We ran The Locals for almost a full year when there were cutbacks here, but we really were devoted to the sites and the news. We wanted to keep it going, so for Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, we found a partner in CUNY, at the Graduate School of Journalism. They’ve been running the site day-to-day in partnership with us. We could not find a similar partner for the New Jersey site.
We just felt after six months of running it on our own that we weren’t really developing it. We didn’t have the resources to learn anything new..
http://streetfightmag.com/2012/01/11/gray-lady-takes-the-local-inside-the-nyts-hyperlocal-efforts/