State of Local

It’s important to be able to accurately judge the reach of a local news site. It’s not just the page views or unique monthly visits. It’s how vital the site is to its core users. Does it have value to advertisers? Is it a factor in the blogosphere?

When you travel into an examination of those metrics, you can rapidly find yourself getting into trouble. What seems to be accurate numbers can often be skewed, or wildly misinterpreted if you don’t pay attention to where those numbers come from and how they are compiled.

Uber-media blogger Jeff Jarvis recently took a swing at using new metrics to measure the popularity and effectiveness of the leading Democratic presidential candidates. While that might not seem like a “local news” issue, the post illustrates some of the problems all of us run into when looking at metrics such as Google searches or YouTube video view numbers.

Google searches: Here, in a chart representing December 2007 in the U.S., we see Clinton generally ahead of Obama but with her falling and then showing a resurgence. What do searches indicate? I think they can at least measure interest if not affection or affiliation.

The problem with examining search numbers is that there’s no way of determining what people are looking for and why. Someone searching for “way to volunteer for Hillary Clinton” gets lumped into the same category as someone looking for dirt on her personal life. It’s impossible to draw any sort of conclusion about what this means.
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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… »

BET Networks said today that the BET Digital Media Group will be launching a vertical advertising network in an effort to give advertisers more exposure to African-American Internet users.

The new advertising will allow advertisers to target African-American consumers across relevant and professional Web sites. BET’s vertical advertising network will offer Web site publishers revenue opportunities by connecting publishers to advertisers trying to reach urban and African-American consumers.

According to Jupiter Research, African Americans are likelier to respond positively to online advertising, and are the second largest online minority after Hispanics with 22.7 million users.

The trend of building vertical ad networks is continuing nationally at a brisk pace. I predict that the trend will rapidly move to local news ad markets, as local broadcast TV and newspapers sites build their own ad networks built around a select number of high-quality local web sites.

This is the time of the year when we look ahead and ponder the challenges we will face in the upcoming months. But as this NY Times article notes, one of the best things you can do for your business is to bring in some outside eyes.

We all tend to think we know our business better than any outsider ever could. But the reality is that new people tend to force us to look at our key challenges in a new light. And sometimes, a fresh perspective can find an answer that we never would have found otherwise.

In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track. When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”
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There seems to be this theory in the business world that everyone should blog.

But, as anyone who has ever read business blogs can tell you, the quality of information and entertainment varies wildly from person to person.

This NY Times article highlights both sides of that quality spectrum, and the piece does make the good point that in the right hands, a blog can be a great marketing tool.

For companies in the technology sector, having a blog is pretty much expected. Still, Tony Stubblebine, the founder and chief executive of CrowdVine, a company that builds social networks for conferences, said that one of his main reasons for blogging is to show that his business model is different from the typical technology start-up.
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I received an email from a “State Of Local” reader who suggested that we should post bios for the various regular blog participants.

I think it’s great idea, and it’s something we’re going to get up and running soon. To be honest, considering how much I enjoy talking about myself, I’m shocked that I didn’t suggest it first.

Internet Broadcasting is a big company, and the nice thing about this blog is that it draws on a lot of different experiences and backgrounds.

Consider this near the top of our 2008 “to-do” list.