State of Local

Singer Mary-Chapin Carpenter once noted that “sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” And I suspect many local news operations have felt a bit like both in recent years.

As print circulation and advertising swoon, the newspaper industry, and news providers generally, have looked for a lifeboat online. And there have been some promising pieces of news in the online advertising market.

The Newspaper Association Of America’s Randy Bennett recently pointed out that in 2003, newspapers collected a mere $1.2 billion from their online operations; last year the figure was nearly $2.7 billion. “We’re growing at a double-digit rate,” he says. Read More… »

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.

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.

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.

Greg Sterling wrote today about the sudden awakening of newspapers in response to years of eroding subscribership and the loss of classified and regular advertising dollars. As a result, the newspapers have been aggressive in their pursuit of joining consortiums (e.g., Yahoo) and aligning strategically (e.g., Blogrunner, Zillow) which are both good tactical first steps. But why are the newspapers stopping there?  Why aren’t they pursuing cross-platform partnerships with equal zeal? Shouldn’t they also be thinking about partnering with the local TV stations, the local radio outlets and more? Singularly, probably none of these has enough clout to outright “own” a market, but combined, couldn’t they build the kind of engaged local audience that advertisers simply couldn’t dismiss?  From a small business perspective, just having a shared business profile might save me countless hours and I can continue to work with a trusted outlet. And better still, my ads are going to reach many, many more eyeballs than I am accustomed to. Sign me up!

I think that the traditional media has for so long competed head-to-head against one another, that the notion of now working together must still be too frightening. Granted, it’d be a lot of work to coordinate such an endeavor, but cooperating and aggregating content sure seems to me to be a better way to remain viable in the consumer’s and avertiser’s eyes. It’s got to be tiring to have to fight for content ownership all the time, especially when the end result is you’ll only own a small piece of it.

NYTimes.com has supplemented its technology coverage with popular tech blogs from Blogrunner, the content aggregator it purchased last year. In the saturated online news market – where portals now occupy three of the top ten news spots, and blogs and aggregators continue to emerge – the strategy for blue chip news brands becomes: If you can’t beat them, buy them (if you can afford them), integrate them and become them. Individually, news blogs and aggregators garner high praise but low unique visitors. The marriage between big eyeballs and big functionality makes sense.

In early October, MSNBC.com bought Newsvine for its social networking and rating capabilities. For the Times, the play is to broaden its offerings beyond its editorial walls. Clearly, the reward of maintaining itself as a top news destination comes at the risk of introducing competitive technology sites to consumers. Additionally, the Times must be careful to protect its journalistic image, “managing the stylistic tension between blogging and formal article writing,” as Greg Sterling puts it. Ultimately, this is a smart move for the Times. The trend is clear: The winners in news won’t be the sites that simply create and market their own content, but the ones that bring consumers the best content and functionality available.