'Hyperlocal' teeters -- or does it?

Posted by Kathleen_McCoy

Posted: August 18, 2009 - 6:26 pm

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Goodbye, LoudounExtra.com: While newspapers are ditching their hyperlocal efforts, large portal sites like AOL and MSNBC.com are buying them. This image is what the LoudounExtra looked like today. It will be gone in a month.Just a few hours ago, the Washington Post announced it was shuttering its intensively local community news site, LoudounExtra.com because, as spokesperson Kris Coratti put it, "We found that our experiment...was not a sustainable model."

Rob Curley, its creator and advocate of hyperlocal content that dates back years to Lawrence, Kansas and online sports cards for Little League ball players (we're talkin' HYPERLOCAL), has moved on to the Las Vegas Sun. Just the other day, I saw an ad for interns to join his team in Vegas; he's often been criticized for hiring young, cheap and eager interns ... and getting a hell of a lot done.

Anyway, I still think hyperlocal is important. It may not be as sexy as a corruption investigation, but if it tells a family what they need to know about their neighborhood school or the safety and status of a park on their block, or where to get a decent local bargain, it's useful. Need-to-know useful will always be good.

This experiment is hardly over. Also noted in today's stories was the purchase this week by MSNBC.com of 28-year-old innovator Adrian Holovaty's Knight-funded hyperlocal site EveryBlock and AOL's purchase earlier this summer of Patch and Going.

Holovaty is much less concerned about the demise of newspapers. In an earlier Washington Post story this spring, he said:

“In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock.

I'm not sure Alex S. Jones (see below), would agree.

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Alex S. JonesTake note of a new book that got a lot of publicity today, Alex S. Jones' Losing the News. I haven't read it yet, but Terry Gross interviewed him today on Fresh Air and you can hear the podcast here. If you don't care to listen, you can see the transcript of the interview here. The Jim Lehrer News Hour also interviewed him, but they don't have the segment on their Web site.

'Losing the News'

Alex Jones makes a lot of sense. One excerpt:

GROSS: Now, you said that you were brought up to believe in fairness, objectivity and accuracy. How do you see that approach to journalism changing as Web sites, blogs and cable news channels take on a bigger role, and opinion journalism becomes much more popular?

Mr. JONES: Well, I think that what's happening to the news is that the news of verification, as you might call it, is being supplanted by the news of assertion, in part because of the tastes of the audience, of Americans, and also in major part because of the economic conditions that have put newspapers, especially, in a position of frantically trying to find ways to survive, and part of the way they've done that is to cut their serious reporters, their experienced reporters, their investigative reporters, the people who do this iron core of serious news, to the bone. And I think that what's being replaced - what is being replaced - replacing that is something that is much cheaper because opinion costs very little.

You don't have to go out and report. All you have to do is give your opinion, and especially if you can make it an aggressive and edgy, an angry opinion and gets into a fight with somebody, that makes good television, that makes good commentary, and a lot of people seem to want that. I think that's where we're headed right now unless we do something about it.

Another good point in the interview. While the idea of nonprofit journalism is appealing when weighed against how corporate journalism overstepped in its bigness, Jones makes the point that fighting those who don't want the news to come out takes bucks, something a profitable business has.

GROSS: Now, you point out that investigative reporting is very expensive, not only because you're paying a reporter or a team of reporters a lot of money to take a long period of time to really dig into a story, but also, as you point out, you need a big legal staff. How important is a legal staff and libel insurance for any news organization that's doing investigative reporting?

Mr. JONES: I think this goes to a part of this whole difficult situation for newspapers and traditional news media that people don't understand, and that is the importance that they do have the economic strength to be able to withstand challenges from people who are against their finding out things that they need to find out.

I think virtually any investigative report is done in opposition to somebody, usually somebody or some institution very powerful. It can take a lot of legal expense and a lot of Freedom of Information Act inquiries, a lot of reaction in the form of boycotts, and this is not just at the New York Times level.