Yes but we’re not living in the small towns of 50-100 years. People don’t need or necessarily want to find community where they live when they have so many other web community options available to them. Community doesn’t necessaril mean local. Personally, I prefer clever verticals to hyperlocal.

Anyway, enough said by me. Thanks for the Barista Net links. And agreed that there are local adverising pportunities — along with non-local.

“Starting with just a few thousand dollars mainly going for promotional t-shirts and mugs the site has grown to now pull in profit. Through all local advertising and classified ads, Barista has pulled in a surprisingly large client base without too much solicitation.”

From: http://www.editorsweblog.org/analysis/2006/12/baristanet_local_journalism_wi.php

A Winter 2007 Nieman reports piece on Baristanet is also interesting, as it explores (in comparison) the failings most newspapers experience when venturing into the hyper-local realm.

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/07-4NRwinter/p64-george.html

As for local news waiting to be covered, I think that fails to miss the point of what will or won’t make hyper-local a success. It isn’t just about news. It is about community. The best hyper-local sites resemble small town papers from 50-100 years ago more than modern mass-media bastions of journalism. But most important, they have the tools to allow the community to be part of the process. The best also are run by people who know the community and are known by it — much like those old time, small town newspaper editors.

But even for bigger papers, the opportunity many seem to be missing is to focus — online at least — on those things that few others (if any) can provide. Like high school sports coverage. Not HS Sports as part of some bigger thing, but pulling all sports resources and putting them all on high school sports. Who else in the community is covering that? How many places can one get better and more in-depth stories on anything college and above? Heck, even if there was no one other than ESPN that is more competition than all but the biggest newspapers can hope to hold a candle to.

Yes, there are opportunities outside of local. But probably not in the same way as there has been in the past. Most newspapers can’t afford a state bureau anymore, much less a Washington reporter. However, as Jeff has reported, some newspapers are coming up with innovative news networks to avoid homogenized AP coverage. I would bet there will soon be the opportunity in many state capitals for a couple of reporters to set up a statehouse news web site and then “syndicate” stories to newspapers.

But the greatest untapped source of advertising remains local, small business. The ultimate lure of hyperlocal is those dollars that few others can get. The problem for many traditional newspapers is that they focus on those dollars (albeit clumsily) first and can’t seem to figure why finding an audience matters more.

Hmmm, just because everyting else is done — which I don’t believe it is — doesn’t mean local is the answer. There are always openings for someone who offers something different or original be it local or international.

I notice even Jeff who used to be completely gungho on local now says local is what “maybe” matters.

As for the alt-weeklies, that sort of makes my point. Two decades ago, they saw a void and pretty much filled it so what’s left to fill now?

Certainly there are badly served areas. Local search, for example, where I believe newspapers, with their archives and journalistic know-how, could be a force and hammer the directories.

And there will always be a demand for local news even though I don’t think there’s way more local news demanding to be covered.

Re Barista Net, it’s done some fun stuff and certainly been livelier than a lot of local newspapers. I’d love to see it turn a profit or is it already?

The only non-advertising item? Obituaries.

In the early 1980s, USA Today came out, and newspaper responded in some good ways - using better quality paper, better quality printing, and using full color - and in some bad ways - such as making news more generic, less local.

I was a newspaper publisher back then, and I’m glad I am retired, but if I were to go back to work, publishing a newspaper, I’d publish weekly, and
it’d look sorta like a city magazine. There’d be a lot of local editions, each one with a circulation of no more than 20,000 or so; it doesn’t make sense for a barber shop to advertise to a million homes. There’d be a really strong emphasis on high school and junior high sports, and on the activities of 4-H, Scouts, and church groups. And yes, there would be obituaries, printed nicely for the people who clip them and save them in the family Bible.

I’m not sure that there’s much future for that kind of a newspaper, but there’s definitely no future for any other kind.

Otherwise, the marketing plan for most newspapers seems to be to throw things overboard. There’s nothing in the paper anymore. The newspaper is dying, they say, yet these newsrooms are publishing instantly, constantly, in a variety of media and platforms. Maybe the best slogan is, “More news, less paper.”

In Jeff’s backyard there is Baristanet (www.baristanet.com), a pipe dream that has garnered some vVC money so that it can export what’s it’s smoking to other NJ towns.

I have also heard the the Morristown Record is successfully rolling out profitable hyper-local sites, parsing up its coverage area into neighborhood-sized chunks.

It isn’t just about the stories, as I’m sure the people at Baristanet will attest. It is about the community. Can you allow it to define itself, can you help it find its voice? Can you provide some stories, some attitude, something useful that readers and advertisers can congregate around?

Many newspaper hyper-local sites simply try to zone the web. There is no community. There is no voice. There is nothing necessary. What a surprise — there is no audience.

Here is reality: Most newspapers have no where to go but local. National, regional, even statewide news is commoditized in most cases and there is no advertising model to support it. If there isn’t anything local or they can’t figure out how to tap it, they are just done. Done. Done.

That isn’t a dream. For those of us working in newspapers its our nightmare.

You see the problem is with publishers. They should have been working towards a more solvent business model a few decades ago. But news organizations tend to be huge, bureaucratic nightmares where the only path to change is incremental. In order to make the numbers work, lots of companies are cutting back everywhere they can.

If the community isn’t crying foul it may be because news orgs aren’t willing to listen. Or worse, newspapers have so inundated readers with stories of cutbacks and strife that readers no longer want to hear the same-old, same-old.

Most local business sections read like Chamber of Commerce newsletters, and this symptomatic of the lack of analysis that characterizes the way most newspapers continue to cover their communities. I’m getting information on what happened yesterday or last week, but not a lot about why it’s happening.

If there was truly such a booming market for local news, don’t you think it would already have been exploited?

Whenever I hear these local news call-to-arms, I always want to ask, “And, precisely what are the stories that are currently going uncovered?”

While, I do think there are opportunities for local newspapers to expoit in covering services online, I’m not buying this idea that there’s some uncovered cache of local news that people are hungry for.

In fact, most decent newspapers do cover local news pretty well with perhaps minor room for improvement.

I wonder if it’s statement about the medium more than the content. That people are accepting print as something that is what it is, not something that can change.

Crossword? I think it’d be cheaper to fax it to you than to print it.

Time to boil the thing to its essence. It’s not a TV company or a game company. It’s a local news company. Either that has market demand or it’s doomed.