The Evolving Newsroom

For those keeping an eye on the success or otherwise of hyperlocal websites, this is worth a read. It's a Wall Street Journal piece about the less-than-stellar debut of a Washington Post hyperlocal site called LoudounExtra.com.


By way of background:

"Like hundreds of other hyperlocal sites launched in the past few years, LoudounExtra.com reflects a basic premise: Metro newspapers probably can't compete with the Internet or cable TV in covering breaking national and international news, but they can dominate what happens in their backyards.

"LoudounExtra.com offers detailed databases including every church, restaurant and school in Loudoun County, about 25 miles west of Washington, D.C. It embraces the idea that a high-school prom is as newsworthy as a debate over where to build a hospital, and that Little League deserves major-league attention. And it promises to let visitors to the site shape the news through blogs and photo and video submissions."

The WSJ notes that despite those intentions, "LoudounExtra.com remains little more than a skeleton of the site its architects pledged to build. One reason: the team of outsiders [brought in to build the site] didn't do enough to familiarise itself with Loudoun County or engage its 270,000 residents."

What leapt out at me was that the Post wasn't linking to LoudounExtra:

"Mr. Curley [the site's developer] says whenever a big story breaks involving Loudoun County, the Post typically publishes it on Washingtonpost.com without a link to LoudounExtra. That deprives LoudounExtra of potential traffic.

"Nor does the Washingtonpost's own dedicated Loudoun County page send visitors directly to its online sibling."

Huh? Links are oxygen.

"In September, when Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit announced it was moving its headquarters from Dulles, Va., to New York, the Post linked to the story on LoudounExtra.com for a couple hours before moving the story back to its own site. That window of promotion fueled the Loudoun site's best traffic day to date, Mr. Curley says.

"Jim Brady [executive editor of Washingtonpost.com] now says he is considering replacing the current Loudoun County page on Washingtonpost.com with LoudounExtra.com, although he adds he doesn't want LoudounExtra.com or future hyperlocal sites to be too dependent on Washingtonpost.com for traffic."

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand why the smaller site should have to stand on its own, especially not from the get-go. No site develops or thrives without links and all sites benefit from more links.

Wouldn't it make more sense to develop a network of niche sites which complement the main web property, and build a matrix of links between them?

I get the feeling audiences are less and less interested in destination sites and want to stumble across information in the natural course of their day or order what they want and have it delivered. I know I am. If that proves true, well-linked networks would make more sense than a chain of isolated sites.

Interesting to see that US blogsite Huffington Post is branching out into local news (via ReadWriteWeb).

Initially, the site will launch an edited news aggregation site (similar to the main Huffington Post web site) localized for the US metro area around Chicago, Illinois. The site will be managed by a single editor to start. "We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news [sic], not just the political blogging the way we began," Arianna Huffington said to [Guardian News & Media's internal Future of Journalism] conference attendees.

Launched three years ago in May of 2005 as a politics-focused celebrity group blog, the Huffington Post has since grown up -- a lot. It added original reporting in November 2006, has taken $10 million in venture financing over 2 rounds, has expanded beyond politics to cover media, business, the environment, and other hot button issues, and is the most linked to blog on the web according to Technorati. Now HuffPo wants to taken on local newspapers.

That makes sense given that analysts have predicted that local ad spending will jump 48% this year to $12.6 billion. The majority of those ads will be search advertising, but clearly, local information is hot with consumers. We've written about the rise of hyperlocal information on ReadWriteWeb before -- Huffington and company are seeking to take advantage of this trend. They want to turn the Huffington Post into a national, virtual newspaper group -- think Gannett or McClatchy but completely online.

And that makes sense, too. A comScore study that we reported on in March revealed that 38% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 are unlikely to read a physical newspaper during a typical week, but non-news readers are still voracious consumers of news. They just get their news online.

I've signed up for Twitter reports from the police department in Hawaii. No particular reason, just because I could. And because I thought it'd be interesting to see how Twitter might work for hyperlocal news services.

Anyway, I'm finding the Hawaii police reports strangely comforting. They are almost always traffic incidents and so far wonderfully benign:

ktlink
traffic incident - no collision 124x ainakoa ave
about 1 hour ago from web

ktlink stalled/hazardous vehicle 46010x kahekili hwy kahekili dip kaneohe
about 1 hour ago from web

Doesn't Kahekili sound nice and exotic. Could be an absolute dump for all I know but I'd like to visit.

Not a bad idea sending out traffic reports on Twitter, is it? Users could read them in their browser at work before heading out the door or have tweets forwarded to their mobile.

Following on from my earlier post about hyperlocal newspapers: Outside.in has linked up with the Washington Post.

Great post from venture capitalist Fred Wilson about hyperlocal. He identifies the inherent problems facing hyperlocal - small, really locally focused online publications:

"There is the problem that over half of the stories are about things that don't really impact or interest me. Steven Johnson calls this the "pothole paradox." That pothole in front of your home or apartment is a big deal to you, but your friend four blocks over couldn't care less. And The Villager [Fred's hyperlocal site] is barely scraping by living off local advertising that is moving fast and furious to Adwords and other forms of web advertising."

He talks about two hyperlocal services, one that he's invested in called Outside.in and the other a new one called Everyblock. Both show terrific promise (Everyblock, for example, lets you search for building permits, lost and found, news articles and crime rates in a particular zipcode) but as he puts it: it's going to be a long slog to get hyperlocal to work.

"There just aren't that many people producing hyperlocal content in a form that is organizable into a new version of a community newspaper.

"And there isn't enough of an incentive to produce hyperlocal content. If a mom (or dad) could blog for two hours every morning between dropping off her kids and going shopping and make $1000-2000/month doing that, we would see a lot more content getting produced. And who better to blog about the high school soccer game, the PTA meeting the night before, or the controversy about the new supermarket coming to town?"

"We need every newspaper in the country to embrace platforms like outside.in and everyblock and showcase their content on the newspaper's pages. We need to find these local voices and amplify them. And we need to attract more of them. And we need to monetize them for their efforts. And then we will have a new kind of community newspaper, one that we program and we read and we comment on. It's coming. I just don't know when."