Will Wash Post Take Another Run at Hyperlocal Under John Temple?

Street Fight  reporting: After crashing and burning in Northern Virginia’s highly competitive hyperlocal space in 2009, the Washington Post has spent the intervening time passively watching competitors from old and new media alike populate its metro backyard — the fifth-biggest consumer market in the U.S.
But it looks like the Post is about to shake off its passivity and again take a run at local audiences and ad dollars. The big, signifying tea leaf is the Post’s appointment of John Temple as managing editor for local news. As editor and publisher of the now-extinct Rocky Mountain News, Canadian-born Temple led development of the YourHub local online network in metro Denver. YourHub was a pioneer in both community news on the Web as well as in enlisting average citizens to help produce that news. In 2010 Temple launched and edited the engagement-focused site Civil Beat site in metro Honolulu bankrolled by civic advocate/philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, founder of PayPal.
Reinforcing my hunch is what I was told by one highly placed media honcho who was interviewed by the Post about Temple before he was hired: “It was clear from the [HR staffer’s] questions that digital content was written all over them.” That jibes with what will be Temple’s informal but revealing title in the Post newsroom – “senior digital editor,” bestowed on him by executive editor Marcus Brauchli.
In his announcement to the Post’s editorial staff, Brauchli lavished praise on Temple’s achievements (“We’re excited to have someone of John’s luminous talents join us…”). But it’s telling that while Brauchli mentioned Temple’s role in helping to launch the pioneering Civil Beat, he conspicuously didn’t mention YourHub, Temple’s earlier, more ambitious digital undertaking in metro Denver’s many communities.
YourHub was ballyhooed by Temple as an exemplar of “citizen journalism,” but in reality it was mostly a conglomeration of press releases and puffery that was pumped through the network’s porous registration system.
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