State of Local

Launching a successful hyper-local web site (or network of sites) has the same attraction and success rate of turning iron into gold.

In theory, creating a site that focuses just on local from a certain neighborhood or section of the city makes sense. People would care about news from their local school board, soccer team and high school glee club. Getting hyper-localized crime stats and other zoning news would likewise seem to be a natural.

But as people have painfully learned, while it’s an idea that makes sense in the abstract, it’s almost impossible to pull off successfully. Particularly if you hope to turn a profit.

Mark Glaser takes a long look at the history of hyper-local news on his PBS blog Mediashift, and as he notes, the sites that are successful tend to be ones run for fun, not profit.

While no one disputes that the Internet and new technology can help small geographical communities share news, the open question is whether these connections will lead to profitability for news organizations or startups. And what’s also unclear is whether independent startups have an advantage or disadvantage to existing traditional local news outlets. Northwest Voice and YourHub have been financially successful for their parent news organizations, but most of their revenue comes from reverse-published print editions. Hyper-local startups with venture capital funding such as Backfence and Bayosphere have flamed out because they couldn’t get enough locals online — and the advertising to support their businesses.

And that’s really the challenge of these hyper-local efforts. How do you keep the effort lean enough to be profitable, and yet have enough content to be relevant? How do you keep the circle of your news coverage small enough to be “hyper-local,” without making the coverage area so small that there aren’t enough advertisers to support the effort?

One solution (and it’s one I haven’t seen a TV or radio site try) is to find volunteers to blog about their particular areas, and aggregate those blogs into a central local news area.

For instance, finding someone to blog about each school district, then aggregating all that coverage into one section that would thoroughly cover every district in the city.

Sure, there are some organizational challenges, but I think it’s an approach that makes more sense than attempting to aggregate other people’s blogs or do it inhouse.