State of Local

One of the biggest challenges any local news organization has faced in recent years has been reorganizing the process of gathering and publishing news across a number of platforms. Local journalism now includes not just the traditional broadcast or print market, but the web, mobile, video, rss, widgets, radio and whatever else comes along.

It’s difficult to find the optimal mix of resources for each task. There are budgetary issues, and in many cases, news organizations have had to revamp their entire business model to survive.

One such reinvention was at the Manchester, U.K. newspaper the Evening News, which decided to make the paper free in central Manchester, while keeping paid-for distribution in the city’s outskirts. That move was part of a larger move to convergence of its different media outlets (which include 23 local weeklies, the flagship daily, the Channel M TV station and several radio stations).

The changes began in 2000, and the results have not only boosted the bottom line, but led to an integrated regional newsroom where all the various outlets share content, staff and other resources.

That central news hub is an interesting development, and its one that makes sense for local news outlets that have several different media businesses. According to Paul Horrocks, editor of MEN, the changes have completely altered the way that organization gathers news. Read More… »

On Thursday, LIN TV Corp. launched a local political website in each of the Company’s 17 markets. Each local political website includes news headline feeds from a variety of area traditional media outlets as well as local and regional political blogs. There is a also a bunch of candidate profiles, voting info and other political research and poll results.

The company owns each of the 50 states local politics.tv domain names, as well as all of the top DMA local politics.tv domain names. One example is Indianapolitics.tv.

Each site includes AP wire stories and video, as well as video and stories from local media partners.

One interesting aspect is that the individual sites include a lot of links to local political blogs, and they appear to be hoping to be a “go-to” aggregator for local political coverage. There’s a prominent “Blog Central” index on the front page, and a link to the main blog story aggregation section is prominently at the top of every page.

It’s an interesting move, and it just shows that local politics verticals are probably going to be the next battleground for local news sites. Local high school sports was the battleground in 2007, and this looks to be the next place where traditional media sites hope to gather some traction.

I’m one of those folks who believes that creating local vertical blogs makes a lot of sense. If you’re a station who has covered Barack Obama for years, why not create a vertical blog with a separate URL rather than rolling the blog into your main news site?

Chicago’s Fox news has done just that, with the blog Obamatracker.com. The blog promises to be a “one stop for all you need to know if you are tracking Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign.”

It’s a nice idea, but it’s definately a web 1.0 presentation. While I think it’s a great idea not to obviously point back to the main Fox Chicago web site, the blog would be improved with a better template and a place to out at least some generic house ads–even just some Google Adsense ads.
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One of the challenges for anyone dealing with local news and the web is staying on top of the newest technologies and services. Yes, there is more on the web than just Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

Here’s a quick look at five sites you should be familiar with. Not so much because you’ll use them, but because they’re a good indication of what everyone will be talking about in six months.

Qik
http://www.qik.com
It’s still in Alpha, but Qik is a piece of software that enables users to stream video directly from their cellphones to the web. It’s possible to go live with a stream from anywhere you can find a solid cellphone connection, and Qik makes it easy to integrate the streams with Twitter. The live streams are also automatically recorded for later use.

I can see a lot of uses for this on a local news site. It would allow photographers an easy way to shoot some quick video from a breaking news situation directly to the internet. I’m just starting to play around with it, and while the quality isn’t always optimal, it’s a powerful tool for lean and mean news organizations. Read More… »

Alan Mutter’s blog “Reflections of a Newsosaur” should be a must-read for anyone interested in the media. He recently posted some figures about the shocking collapse of valuation among publicly-traded newspaper publishers.

I suspect most of us realize it’s been a challenging time for the newpaper industry. But these numbers are honestly scary to anyone who regularly reads a newspaper.

The market value of the American newspaper publishers entering 2008 as independent, publicly traded companies has fallen by $23 billion, or 42%, since the end 2004, the year before the wheels started coming off the industry. Nearly half the slide in the market capitalization of newspaper stocks came in 2007, when the shares lost a collective $11 billion, or 26%, of their value. Thus, newspapers lost nearly as much value last year as they did in the two prior years put together. Read More… »

TV news stations love their brands. They splash their logos, slogans and anchor mugs on air, on billboards and the sides of big-city buses.

Stations also brand themselves online with the same smiling anchors and punchy mottos. The strategy generally enjoys limited success, with many stations still struggling to gain a sizable share of local online traffic.

One veteran executive of the digital news world has some advice for those stations: Help your brand pack its bags, drive it to the station and give it an emotional kiss goodbye. Then go home and get to work doing something useful online.

Nancy Bruner’s been doing new media for more than a decade. She just made the switch from heading digital content for the The Seattle Times Co. to leading online development for Fisher Communications. Fisher, based in Seattle, is a publicly traded firm that owns 19 TV stations and nine radio stations, plus a satellite and fiber distribution system and a data center.

Fisher brought Bruner on board shortly after buying Pegasus News, a Dallas-based site that’s trying to forge a next-generation mold for local digital media. Pegasus has a bit of everything – staff writing, aggregating, events listings and a “Daily You” algorithm that learns users’ preferences. Fisher plans to hone the model in Dallas and then adapt it to other markets. Read More… »