After having been on this rollercoaster ride of exuberance and despair for now 19 years, dating back to the early days of CD-ROM and interactive TV, we are closer than ever to the networked world that Jeff writes so eloquently about…but it’s not going to be exactly what we expect. It’s not about delivering content, it’s about having access — real, sustained access — to sources whose reputations are/will be built up over time. As we migrate from daily to real-time publications, perhaps the business model becomes about who can make the connections to make things happen, not who can write the story about what just happened.

Facebook, by opening up its API, is enabling a thousand flowers to bloom.

(…I do wonder, though, about the role of news bureaus in this vague new world. IMHO, the closure of international news bureaus leads to fewer resources who know the lay of the land and the backgrounds of the local personalities…and without their presence, and those like them, I feel we are losing the multiple points of perspective that lead to better investigative journalism. But that’s a point for another day.)

Spot on.

So we built our own. http://www.twadservices.co.uk.

And now we’re finding a market for just that type of structure - ie a hyper-local adify, doubleclick, etc - BUT with all the local trust, recognition etc that comes with having that run and serviced by the same, small town ad man that was working the local newspaper beat for 25 years.

And now, my pal who runs one of the best restaurants in the city http://www.lastwinebar.co.uk wants to embed advertising buttons/banners from his suppliers around his restaurant site with our ad network in support.

And we’ve got interest from the local music/club listings site; the University concert site, etc… local answer to a local need….

The good news is that this will be a reality soon. Demand for such a network is growing as hyperlocal and mobile media outlets - news and otherwise - come online. You can see it coming through Google, Yahoo, and even Nokia’s recent announcements and acquisitions and I speak to small companies every week who are going after the opportunity in innovative ways.

(I sold the hyperlocal site that I started, and it’s still kicking quite nicely.)

Jeff Jarvis takes the occasion of the “long-time coming closing” of backfence to talk broady about rhe Local Challenge:

Hyperlocal will not, I firmly believe, happen at one site. It will work only via networks: content, commercial, social…

First, there doesn’t appear to be enough interest at the neighborhood level to produce much user-generated content in the vast majority of places. For the moment, hyper local is a tad too local to succeed — even when you’re gathering in the content from many sources.

Second, to some extent the online community and the geographic community that co-exist in the real world may be different enough that a) the one can’t/won’t produce the right content for the other and b) the interest of the online community are just as much in learning about their digital neighbors as in learning about what street/school/fire issues will impact them.

Anyway, I think you are on the right track for sure.

Here’s PressThink’s review of Backfence from 05, which got at some of these issues:

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/11/30/lz_bcfc.html

While I agree with your concepts Jay, in practice, I disagree with that statement, at least unqualified. One reporter per town, or five towns can give people hyper-local news, if we all let go of our Woodward & Bernstein fantasies of what is news.

Our site has neighborhood maps of no more than a few miles radius with stories, events and garage sales plotted. Part of the way we do that is by mining city and school district sites for news in areas where there are no content partners or bloggers to work with.

It ain’t glamorous, but if there’s a temporary road closing near you, it’s news. And you can’t wait/depend on someone in that community to blog it.

Where it gets cool though is that these trivial, government-supplied neighborhood stories, mixed with a little search engine mojo, become breadcrumbs for folks who come in the door, comment on what you got right/wrong, and then start contributing regularly with real narrative reporting.

I won’t kid you — that’s a slow process. And it takes a real farmer to cultivate that kind of participation. The seeding with “release” type news has to continue, because without a flow of content, there’s no frequency and without frequency, today’s item written by a member of the community won’t be read or responded to…Meaning they won’t be repeat contributors and you won’t have a business.

If what users want is truly local news (in my case, when is the renovation of Washington Square Park going to begin, how long will it last, and where are my kids going to play while it’s going on…?) then dropping your book columnist, eliminating movie reviews, and re-assigning all your national desk people to local news doesn’t even come close to getting you there, even though it may seem like a radical re-structuring when you start with newsroom staffing as the given.

Even assigning a single reporter to every one of the towns in a given circulation area is beyond the reach of most newspapers, but one reporter per town isn’t going to give people hyper-local news. That’s why Jeff is right that only overlapping systems working together can get this done.