State of Local

Do you consider yourself knowledgeable about the online community in your area?

Then answer this question.

Name three prominent local blogs and/or bloggers.

If you can’t do that, then you aren’t nearly knowledgable enough about your local online scene. If you don’t want to use these blogs as any part of your news coverage, that’s your call. Don’t want to ever link to local blogs from your site? I think that’s a bad call, but it’s your choice.

But if you don’t have a clear sense of who is blogging locally and why, then you have no baseline for deciding what your news organization should be doing online.

Whether you’re a television station, newspaper or radio station, you are probably obsessed with “branding.” Which makes sense, if you’re dealing with traditional media.

If your TV station is branded “News 13,” well, then you want everything you’re associated with to be branded the same way. You want your website to be News13.com and you are going to focus all of your station resources towards that co-branded site.

But that “branding is everything” philosophy doesn’t necessarily translate to the Web. Online users are less impressed with a brand, and more likely to be drawn to sites that are useful to them, no matter who they are affiliated with. It’s all about the connection to users, and to the social fabric of the web.

That point is illustrated by this Washington Post piece on AOL’s current trend of launching websites which often have no direct connection to AOL.com itself. Read More… »

Who knew? Good local news coverage that people want to read depends on good journalism.

Steve Outing, proponent of citizen journalism and columnist for Editor and Publisher, shares an excellent cautionary tale about his experience relying on user-generated content to create a business.

The idea seemed solid: Create a site centered on an expert contributor (say, a climbing enthusiast who knows what she’s talking about and can write informatively) but count on energetic climbers out there to jump in and provide lots of great content. Read Steve’s post because I’m glossing over details, but fundamentally, the user-generated stuff as a whole just wasn’t good enough or consistent enough to attract a big enough audience to make a business. Too much crap, not enough real information that readers found worthwhile.

It will be a while before the primordial ooze of user-generated content evolves into a living, breathing reliable news provider without a strong framework of  people who are paid to find stuff out and tell the world about it.

The number of people systematically gathering news in an organized fashion matters. Having thousands of user/gatherers out there sending comments, photos, videos, documents and more is a tremendous opportunity. But that mass needs help. As the economic model crumbles for old-fashioned newspapers and TV stations, the old-fashioned gatherers, writers, choosers and filterers continue to have value.

In some ways, Facebook is the ultimate enabler of “local” connections. The site allows you to connect (or reconnect) with all sorts of communities, and as this column in Information Week notes, the problem with that is you’re often connected with people you would just as soon forget.

By the time you’ve reached your forties, chances are you’re out-of-touch with more friends than you’re in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans… Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

This problem is something to consider as you work on ways for local users to connect with each other. People don’t always want to be found, or contacted or sold to by advertisers.

As a local news operation, one of the biggest advantages you have is trust and comfort. Keeping that bond with your users doesn’t limit your sales opportunities, but it does offer up some special challenges. The advantage for you is that you’re building a relationship with your local users that will last longer than their current infatuation with whatever hot social network is currently grabbing headlines.

This may sound like a question with a very obvious answer. But what does “local” really mean online?

The temptation is to see local as simply geography. If I’m a news organization, then focusing on “local” usually just means aggregating local news and information and offering it unfiltered to my web site’s visitors.

The problem with that approach is that when you talk to your readers, they tend to see local as more of a mental location than a dot on the map. Yes, they do care about what’s happening in their town. But local is so much more for them.

To consumers , “local” means the things that are important to their lives. It might be local weather, the sports scores and traffic conditions. But they also may belong to a international soccer fan club and manage their daughter’s baseball team.  All of those things have equal importance in their eyes, and the challenge for news organizations is to aggregate and present all those mental “neighborhoods” in a way that works both for the users and for your advertisers.

One of the reasons that sites such as MySpace and Facebook have succeeded so spectacularly is that they enable their users to connect with their “local” interests. Sometimes its geographical (this is who I work with), and sometimes the proximity is less important (this is who I went to school with).

One of the things I want to explore in future posts is that real meaning on “local,” and how we can help redefine what that means for local media outlets.

The New York Times Tech blog “Bits“ ran a great piece last week detailing how the local web is being used to drive real-world purchases, perhaps indicating that the long portended death of brick and mortar outlets has been greatly exaggerated. According to Bits, “E-commerce purchases are expected to grow a healthy but unspectacular 17 to 20 percent this holiday season over last year’s. But the Web’s influence over what people buy could be growing even faster.

Major retailers like Target, Home Depot and others have enlisted the help of Chicago-based ShopLocal.com, to enable local viewers to use their sites to complete offline purchases they’d previously researched online. According to ShopLocal’s in-house data, they’re seeing a 50% increase in online-influenced purchases when compared to 2006. According to a Forrester Research report issued last spring this type of purchase activity is expected to amount to 16% of total sales this year and be as high as 50 percent of all sales by 2011.

This kind of pre-purchase activity makes great sense for the consumer. There’s enough worry about the security of online transactions that many times even a slightly lower price or free shipping can’t overcome. In addition, by completing the transaction in person, the consumer can see and inspect the product up close. But, this type of activity can also make sense for the retailer, because the same thing can be done in reverse.

A consumer can just as easily enter a retail outlet to search and satisfy the tactile senses before going back to the computer to complete the purchase. In that scenario, the retailer has a motivated, captive audience than can possibly be sold items beyond those of which they are searching. Perhaps the retailers could also focus on the delivery, installation and service niche as an additional means to woo customers.