Howard Owens on What It Takes to Sustain a Hyperlocal News Site
“If there’s any clear message, it’s what I’ve been saying for the past four or five years: Starting and running a local news site is hard work,” says the Batavian editor and publisher. “You need a good model, a solid plan, the ability to work long hours and handle multiple disciplines and stick with it for years and years with no promise of ever striking it rich. If you can do that, you’re on the right track.”
Report: Online Ad Revenue to Hit $24.3B in 2013
In looking at the categories of ad revenue, Borrell found that displays ads, which have taken a lot of heat in the industry for their supposed increasing irrelevance,, remain the dominant choice of businesses. But targeted display has moved ahead of run-of-site display, and targeted’s rate of growth is far higher…
How Partnerships Can Help Hyperlocal Sites Expand Their Reach
There’s a saying that’s echoing more insistently today in hyperlocal publishing: “Don’t compete – collaborate.” Editor and publisher Susan Mernit puts that saying into practice at Oakland Local, partnering with other media and non-profits to juice content, build visibility, and generate revenue…
PublicStuff Gets Answers for Local Citizens, Even in Chinese
Local publishers have long served their communities by shining a light on municipal issues until the folks at City Hall take notice and fill in those dangerous potholes. But in the past few years we’ve also seen several startups pop up that want to make an even more direct connection between citizens’ complaints and government action…
DNAinfo’s NYC Schools Guide Shows Off ‘Network Effect’
The neighborhood-centric news site has created a guide that lets users zoom in and out so they can get the nitty-gritty about specific schools and compare it to other schools throughout New York City. The way the design uses dots and arrows to retrieve many pages of articles is a singular achievement in user-friendliness…
Village Soup Shows ‘Native’ Ads Can Work on Local News Sites
With the recent push toward “native” advertising, we’ve learned (if we hadn’t known already) that ads can be “news.” In terms of local information value, ads-as-news may never trump the apartment-house fire that leaves several families homeless — but it has become clear that there’s room for both, especially in the local digital space…
Deep Cuts Brought Daily Voice Back From the Brink
Faced with uneasy investors and a cash burn of $500,000 a month, the company’s founder Carll Tucker wondered last weekend: “Is this it?” But after 48 hours of number crunching, Tucker finally came up with a one-page document that he was convinced would be Daily Voice’s passport to a secure future…
A Decade Old, iBrattleboro Keeps Journalism First, Profits Second
For co-founders Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, the bottom line is not what’s found in the last entry on a profit-and-loss statement.. “Journalism is a little more important than money,” Grotke says. “If you’re doing [hyperlocal] to make money, I suggest you not do it in a small town. Go to a big city.”
How to Scale Local and Stay Entrepreneurial
The Alternative Press, which quickly grew to 15 sites in suburban New Jersey (three wholly owned and the rest licensees), is now hoping to replicate that success by growing into a network of 100-plus sites. That’s almost twice as big as the footprint of corporate pure play Daily Voice and in the same league as networks operated by the Chicago Tribune (TribLocal) and Denver Post (YourHub)…
EveryBlock Was Experiment in Data Journalism That Fell Short
When it was launched in 2007 by digital wunderkind Adrian Holovaty, EveryBlock was hailed as one sure part of hyperlocal’s future. As a result of Holovaty’s coding, the site was able to tease out for publication petabytes of government-collected data that otherwise might not ever see the light of day. EveryBlock was a pioneer in collecting, sorting, and filtering data. But it hadn’t progressed to turning its digital buckets of information into knowledge. Its vaunted coding, which located every overturned garbage can, couldn’t do that…
NBCU Shutters Pioneering Hyperlocal Network EveryBlock
EveryBlock’s original goal was to collect as much local data as possible, sort and filter it, and then present it to its audience. EveryBlock’s president, Brian Addison, who was hired by NBC in mid-2011, changed all that. In announcing the closure, Vivian Schiller, a senior vice president at NBC News, said, “The decision to shut down the site was difficult. But in the end, we didn’t see a strategic fit for EveryBlock within the portfolio.” Read more…
Humanizing ‘Dry’ Data Is Only Part of the Challenge for Community News
I’m utterly convinced that data will be the salvation of community news sites, both in delivering more audience-engaging content and doing so cost-effectively. But the big problem in community journalism is not data that’s dry and creepy. It’s data that’s incomplete, badly formatted, sloppily collected or – most serious of all – withheld…
Under a Bushel in Bay Area, a Model for Hyperlocal
Redoubtable hyperlocal editor Tracy Record, who told me about Claycord.com, described it in her inimitable way: “When I stumbled onto it recently, it made me cry. It is so much like what we do, down to the community’s comments and involvement.” To find out more about the site, I posed a variety of questions to its founder, editor, and publisher…
For Hyperlocals, How Long the Roller-Coaster Ride?
Borrell Associates delivered an upbeat 2013 projection last week for an increase of 31% in ad spending in the local digital space. But even as the outlook seems brighter for local online, highly regarded hyperlocal editor and publisher Mike Fourcher announced his plans to leave the helm of his two neighborhood sites in Chicago…
For 2013, SeeClickFix Moves Beyond Its Pothole-Filling Mission
Municipalities spend about $10 handling a 311 call about a pothole. SeeClickFix can cut that cost to close to zero by delivering to City Hall, via jaw-rattled citizens, GPS-pinpointed information about new potholes plus digital photos of the road damage. What’s in store for SeeClickFix in 2013? We went to cofounder Ben Berkowitz to find out…
‘Indie’ Publishers Are Ready to Start Roaring
The Local Independent Online News Publishers association is still in the cub stage, but it’s getting ready to roar. There’s a 11-member board of directors, a sense of mission that’s powered by what looks like a strong start in networking, and not least funding from the Patterson Foundation that will encourage LION’s growth by subsidizing membership dues…
‘Post-Industrial Journalism’ Report Deserves an A, and an F
A new report from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism takes a look at everything that’s wrong with digital journalism, starting at the top and going all the way down to the hyperlocal level. The report pins antiquated journalistic practices to the wall and recommends specific fixes. But it also wrongly asserts that the Internet has permanently “wrecked” journalism’s advertising model.
The ‘New News Ecology’ Needs to Be Nourished With Sustainable Revenue
The grand, this-is-where-we’re-going commitment at the Journalism That Matters meeting held last week in Denver was encouraging. Local journalism needs this re-invention of what it does and how it relates to a newly empowered public that is outgrowing its old role as a passive consumer of news. I hope, though, that JTM members will also make “investigating new economic models” an important part of the new news ecology they’re creating.