Memo to Hyperlocal Editors: You Too Can Be a Nate Silver
As I watched Nate Silver achieve such success analyzing numbers during the election, I asked myself: Can hyperlocal news sites learn anything from FiveThirtyEight? The question is pertinent because numbers of all kind — far beyond those from polling and elections — are gushing from local governments, but not many of them are showing up in meaningful ways on community sites…
DataSphere Adds Belo to Its Community News Clients
Hyperlocal middleman DataSphere has added Belo Corp. and 14 of its TV stations in top markets to its client list of broadcast chains who have gone digital at the community level. The Belo markets that DataSphere will serve with tech and sales services include Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Seattle/Tacoma and Phoenix…
How One Hyperlocal Editor and His Site Chased, and Were Chased by, Sandy
When a gigantic “frankenstorm” knocks out the power for your reporters and many other contributors, how can a hyperlocal site keep its coverage online and help its community? Here’s how The Alternative Press, the 19-site, 34-community network in suburban New Jersey, did it last week under the direction of founding editor and publisher Mike Shapiro.
Does Hyperlocal ‘Engagement’ Work — And Can it Be Monetized?
In 2002, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jan Schaffer founded J-Lab to help the news media use technology to engage citizens on big public issues. There’s a lot of talk about hyperlocal news sites using technology and social media to take civic journalism to a new level where the community is an equal player, but how much is wishful thinking and how much reality? I went to Schaffer for answers…
Village Soup Today: The Pot Is Full and Bubbling Again
Counting all his revenue streams — online and print subscriptions, paid business and nonprofit briefs, display ads and licensing for publishing software — Reade Brower says he has achieved, in a few months’ time, the sustainability that eluded former Village Soup owner Richard Anderson in 14 years. “Everything is very steady,” Brower said. “The money is good.”
Sac Press’s Ilfeld: More Talk About Reader Revenue at Hyperlocals
Two major online news industry conferences were held recently — BxB Summit 2012 in Chicago and ONA12 in San Francisco. I asked Ben Ilfeld, COO of the Sacramento Press and an inveterate news industry conference goer who was a participant at both meetings, for his take on what took place at both…
‘Legacy’ Media in Phoenix Reach Out to Communities
Earlier this year, the Gannett-owned Arizona Republic and its sister TV station, KPNX, went hyperlocal in an audacious way. The metro region’s two major “legacy” media embarked on a plan to grow editorial contributors from the community — the affluent, well-educated and rapidly growing East Valley, including the city of Scottsdale. So how is this experiment going six months later? To find out, I put some questions to John Triplett, the content partnership editor at the Republic…
How Local Sites Can Leverage Technology to Build Community
I wonder why more hyperlocal news sites aren’t adopting, or at least adapting to, this new news model that makes community and journalism what they should be – partners. Journalists need to enter this new wall-less newsroom that has been reassembled digitally in the community. If they don’t, they will end up clutching at their buggy whips like the hansom drivers who had to give the right-of-way to Henry Ford’s Model A…
New Jersey Hyperlocal Network TAP Celebrates 4 Years, Continues to Expand
Former lawyer Mike Shapiro’s The Alternative Press has now grown to 18 separate hyperlocal publications, including licensees, and is preparing for another major expansion. How does Shapiro do what some news industry experts have said is next to impossible for independent community sites like his? Street Fight caught up with him recently to find out…
Extracting Key Metrics to Make Your Hyperlocal Site More Valuable
“Quantitative” data — those UVs and PVs — work effectively for advertisers who want volume, Lofgren says, but most hyperlocals aren’t big enough to deliver multi-millions numbers in audience. “Qualitative” data, he says, tells you who your customers are — by their activity on the site, as it’s actually happening — or their identity, with information neatly served up from sign-up info. But it can tell much more if the publisher surveys a sampling of site visitors with multiple-choice questions…
‘Indie’ Hyperlocal ARLNow Replicates With New Outlets in Suburban D.C.
Founder Scott Brodbeck is expanding his “indie” site from Arlington, Va., adding the affluent, mostly white suburb of Bethesda, as well as adjacent and demographically similar communities in Maryland’s Montgomery County. Street Fight spoke with Brodbeck how and why he was expanding his site’s footprint, and what other indie hyperlocal publishers should think about when the look to grow beyond their initial towns…
A Hyperlocal Co-op Hopes to Bloom in Community ‘News Desert’
Longtime print journalist Tom Stites says the model for his Web-based Banyan Project is that of a co-op — the economic and social structure for sizable minority chunks of the American power industry and agriculture, as well as credit unions and housing developments. We talked to him recently to find out more about what his “third-way” media approach is all about…
Block-by-Blockers Respond to Borrell’s Revenue Prescription
“People are beginning to figure out that the display advertising model is a bad carryover from mass media,” says Gordon Borrell. “What does that mean for the future of hyperlocal websites? I think there’s value in them, but I honestly don’t think there’s enough value to sustain the business model in any single market beyond being a very small niche.”
Will ‘Breaking Promos’ Help Hyperlocals Bring New Customers to SMBs?
SMBs have been flocking to social sites like Facebook, where they can set up neat pages about their products and service. That’s fine, says Scott Karp, but “the only customers they reach are existing ones.” To solve this, his service Breaking Promos lets SMBs create pages on a social site that runs within the pages of hyperlocal news sites….
Getting Local Online Ad Dollars to Flow Into Hyperlocal News
Hyperlocal news sites are turning up everywhere, but advertisers aren’t following them nearly as fast. “Advertisers don’t want to be around local news,” Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, told Street Fight. I went to several people building business models around hyperlocal news to find out how they are planning to turn the tables on Borrell’s assessment…
Daily Voice CEO: We’re ‘Far Closer’ to Profitable Than the Competition Is
Zohar Yardeni has served as CEO of the The Daily Voice — a hyperlocal news network of 52 sites in suburban New York and Connecticut and central Massachusetts formerly known as Main Street Connect — since November, 2011. Street Fight checked in with Yardeni recently to see how he and the Daily Voice were competing in their hotly contested local digital space…
With Offbeat Features, Hyperlocals Can Spark Better Engagement
Maybe hyperlocal news sites should take a look at the old Life magazine formula, and see how they could adapt it to their news mix. I’m not saying that local sites should start running pinups. But a steady diet of stories about school budget hearings and local festivals aren’t enough. Why not spice up the homepage with more local feature content — especially stories that have strong visuals…
Billions in Local Ad Dollars Surge to Online — But Just a Trickle to News
We hear a lot about the surging growth of local online ad revenue, and, to be sure, the numbers are growing fast — to $16.4 billion in 2011 (up 18% annually) and $19.90 billion projected for 2012 (up 22.2%), according to Borrell Associated. But very little of that revenue is flowing to “pure-play” news hyperlocals…
After the ‘Fiscal Cliff,’ an Opening for the ‘Journalism of Hope’
In the coming years, the reverberations from big cuts in federal spending along with the likely new stimulus spending will continue throughout America, from Washington to the states, cities, suburbs, and rural communities – and to every one of the 50,690 census tracts. This will be a long-running story that USA Today and the Gannett local papers could own – and monetize on their websites…