Street Fight reporting:
I respectfully disagree with Bob Garfield. I’ll come out and say it. I
admire his work and enjoy his program. But on the question of
hyperlocal media, I believe Bob is wrong. In an interview with Borrell
Associates, Garfield said that hyperlocal news ventures are doomed
and that no one outlet can attain the critical mass necessary to
deliver the local news professionally and profitably in the future. I
beg to differ and will reiterate some of the themes I have covered in
the past but are worth repeating.
First, let’s cover where Bob is
right. Applying the traditional advertising-driven model and corporate
structures to hyperlocal will not work. Most hyperlocal efforts by big
corporations such as AOL and Gannett have either not been profitable or
not been profitable enough to merit continuation. Some Patch sites, according to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, are now profitable and it’s possible that Patch could scale to run profitably.
....
Those economics can be made to work, however, given the right amount
of elbow grease, advertising smarts and, most importantly, a commitment
and connection to the community. I’ve written a number of times about West Seattle Blog,
a mom-and-pop hyperlocal blog that pulls in over 1 million page views
per month and is solidly profitable. At West Seattle, a day of postings
could include a dozen items, each piece unique and expressly local.
Often, these posts are timely. A dozen news posts a day is about four
times more than what I have seen in my local Patch blogs. It takes
commitment to get that many posts up per day. It’s a grind. But it’s
doable and it drives traffic, if the posts are substantive and valuable.
West
Seattle uses a rotating cadre of display ads purchased by
community-minded local merchants. This is fairly crude in terms of
advertising. But it works. So I wonder what the economics would be like
when more sophisticated forms of advertising work their way down to the
hyperlocal level? By this I mean ads that could more easily target user
behavior or deliver content from the advertisers to site visitors.
Rather than just a rotating list of ads, sports sections could only
carry ads for sporting goods stores, school supplies, electronics and
restaurants. With Twitter and other real-time microblogging tools,
merchants can integrate hourly deals into the local blog spots in order
to, say, take advantage of bad weather (BOGO hot cocoa at the local
coffee shop, anyone?).
It’s so early in the new news game that I’d venture online news will
enjoy more significant changes in the next decade than it has in the
last — and that’s saying something, considering that the last decade saw
the rise of the broadband Internet and smartphone saturation.
Ironically, the very same week that Garfield nailed the coffin shut on
hyperlocal, we read about how NPR used localized Facebook targeting to
jack traffic on some of its articles. Smart! Very smart!
So, the
point being, the models are still forming but I have no doubt that we
will see a vibrant ecosystem of profitable hyperlocal publications. They
will not be as profitable as the old quasi-monopolistic news system
when a single daily drove the news cycle for an entire town. They will
need to be driven by passion and commitment because the necessary dose
of community participation can smell naked profiteering like a skunk
trapped in an In-n-Out Burger bathroom.
They will need tech chops
to keep their cost structures low, to take advantage of developing tools
that empower detailed data-driven reporting, and to deliver the types
of content-driven, audience-driven ads that will be required to best
serve both advertisers and readers. In an era when the community commons
has been replaced by Facebook, the news that feeds healthy communities
must change and will change. Last time I checked, Facebook was doing
pretty well. Give it time and hyperlocal will do well, too.
http://streetfightmag.com/2012/02/15/bob-garfield-is-wrong-heres-why/?utm_source=Street+Fight+List&utm_campaign=ac01f6fac0-Street_Fight_Daily2_15_2012&utm_medium=email
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