State of Local

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.

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.

CBS Outdoor has got a pretty cool new hyper-local, multi-platform test going on in New York that bears watching. CBS created a free 20-block WiFi area in Manhattan using billboards and bus stops to support the zone. Anyone accessing the WiFi on laptop or cellphone gets an ad-supported home page with local and national news, sports, weather, etc., and allows users to perform uber-local searches for area businesses, entertainment options and more. From an advertising perspective, only people within this somewhat limited geographic radius are going to see your ads, so the potential for conversion–or action–on behalf of the consumer should be at a premium. Health and weather permitting, all of these consumers are practically within walking distance. A deli could post a “half off on a Reuben” ad at 11:00AM and by 1:00PM be able to see the ROI on it’s investment. Can’t get much more immediate feedback than that.