BuzzMachine

One of the many things I left undone when I quit my job was a plan to start an announcement tool. I wanted a means for people to announce weddings, births, deaths, promotions, graduations, anything. This, after all, is the news that really counts in people’s lives. Now in the UK the Johnston chain of papers is enabling this with a company called iAnnounce.

The cost for announcement ads varies across titles but the interactive service will be automatically bundled with the print announcement. Members of the public can then offer to keep the page live by renewing the announcement for a monthly fee. . . . Chief executive Alex Stitt . . . said that in 2006, the announcement industry generated £80m in the UK with more than two million ads posted every year. As much as 95% of those are posted in local newspapers. “The need to announce is hardwired for people,” said Mr Stitt. “Local newspapers are all about community, and this takes something old fashioned and makes it exciting and new.”

It doesn’t get more hyperlocal than this.

Bakersfield’s collaborative pothole map. [via Squared]

At last week’s meeting of the minds at NPR, there was much discussion about the difficult position local stations find themselves in as the value of their distribution diminishes. And it was said, as an article of faith or perhaps reflex, that going local is the answer — the same answer given for newspapers these days. But as I thought about it on the train ride back, I wondered what that really means.

Obviously, it’s not easy for a radio station to get hyperlocal; it has just one big pipe and no resources to cover a market broadly. It’s not easy for newspapers, either, but they clearly have a headstart with a larger staff of reporters and the ability to slice their products into local zones. So I asked myself what the strength of a radio station is and the answer’s apparent: promotion. A station can drive a sizable audience to something new online. But what do they get when they get there? And what content on the radio station continues to draw the audience to give it that promotional power? Not easy questions.

I’d start and the end and say that a local radio station must stop thinking of itself as radio. It has the power to develop local communities of news, information, and interest. It can use its promotional power to drive people there. It could, for example, get people in a market to record every damned school board and town council meeting and put them online, served by the station. It could create the meeting place where people share news and information, competing with or even in cooperation with local papers. It could be a home for talk about local issues and news.

So what is the on-air content? It’s not hyperlocal. But it could be a meta version of that: talk about the issues that cut across the region with reporting from the best of the local communities. It could feature the best citizen critics giving you reviews of local arts and entertainment. I don’t come up with much here. So I’d say that the station has a limited time frame in which to use its promotional power.

Here’s Zadi Diaz’ take on the same issue out of the same meeting:

So why listen to radio?

There will always be a need to connect in real-time. To know that there is another person on the flip side that can give you perspective on the present and can communicate back to us. It’s a living, breathing thing. And in a world that becomes progressively automatic, the need to connect on a deeper level will grow.

People like to be social. Twitter is proof of that. To me twitter is the text version of a well-oiled ham radio. People sending out ideas, and questions, and mundane little things that may only be of importance to a handful. But it’s that instant live connection that makes it so special. You know what someone is doing at that very moment. And in a sense, it puts you there with them.

People also love to tell their stories. To each other. Conversation. The thing about Twitter that makes it electric is that there are multiple conversations going on at once. You become a receptor, a connector, and a storyteller all at once. I feel this is the key to the future of live broadcasting:

Becoming a converstation. No misspellings there.

Creating a converstation within NPR can only benefit everyone involved. Maria Thomas, who invited us to the panel discussion spoke about how NPR was born of storytellers. It immediately conjured images in my mind of people sitting around a campfire and sharing their stories. Around that campfire there is the storyteller and the people listening. The storyteller isn’t in a vacuum, there is ambiance, they occupy space, they are also listening to the listeners. The storyteller is the independent producer who is an expert in the story they tell. NPR can build small campfires and enable those storytellers to begin and ultimately develop the grandest story of all.

Local member stations+storytellers= campfires

Campfires can especially grow in a beautiful way online. The use of a website becomes less about providing news (we have feeds for that), and more about being a social hub where people can go to connect. There is a reason why there are so many social networking sites. Why can’t organizations think of their websites like they do their buildings?
- You have your reception area where the receptionist answers your FAQs
- Office spaces which are only accessible to employees
- Conference rooms where you hold meetings
- Mess hall where people from inside can congregate and speak to each other
- Lobby where people from the outside can talk to each other and to the employees
- Etc.. play room?

If you’re not afraid to open up your building to the public, there should be no fear of opening up your web site to a little one-on-one communication.

So what you end up with is an endless number of little radio stations making their own connections. The old radio station is some collection of the best or widest of that.

I’m still not satisfied that there is a great answer for local radio. But if the Siriux, XM merger (below) goes through, I think that creates more opportunities for local NPR radio. The rest of radio — from the big companies and from satellite — will be national. NPR member stations can be the last outpost of local radio. They can’t afford to get more local on their own but they can do it in partnership with their listeners.

: Zadi was nice enough to note:

- just googled the word “converstation” and realized Jeff had blogged about the word a while back. How funny.

McClatchy buys two hyperlocal citizens’ media sites in California. FresnoFamous will continue to operate independently. It’s a smart move for McClatchy that also recognizes the value of these enterprises. It’s nice to see that a founder got an exit but that’s not the only way to work together; I say that big media can work with small media in other ways, such as becoming an ad sales agent.

Baristanet is now on TV. Check out the first episode about an issue ready to blow up in the ‘burbs.

The Journal writes a good primer on marketing online via blogs and search and such. Buried in there is a gem of an anecdote that shows why newspapers and yellow pages are in deep trouble with local advertising — unless they find new ways to serve them and compete with Google:

It’s hard to engage in any public relations, of course, if the public doesn’t know you exist. In early 2004, Kenny Kormendy says he was on welfare and struggling to make ends meet as a taxi driver in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. He had tried to reach the public through typical means, such as ads in the telephone book or handing out cards at the airport, but says there “were so few calls, it was unreal.”

Mr. Kormendy was decent on computers, he says, and so he built a rough Web site for his company, Gopher State Taxi, figuring travelers coming to town might locate him when searching for transportation. But he never popped up front and center in search-engine results until he stumbled upon Google’s AdWords service, a cost-per-click advertising program that rotates advertisements on the right side of Google’s search page based on the specific keywords a user types. He decided to give it a shot.

It paid off. In recent months, Gopher State Taxi has routinely popped first on Google’s sponsored link for core keywords, including: “Minneapolis, airport, taxi.” Mr. Kormendy says his business has grown to a network of nearly three dozen cabs and he is off welfare. He estimates his total payout to Google is about $175 to $205 monthly, based on how many clicks his ads get. “People with cellphones on planes can find me,” he says. “Almost every time I ask someone, they tell me it was on the Internet. And nine times out of 10 it’s from Google. I don’t have $50,000 to compete with [bigger taxi companies]. But with what I create off the Internet, I can blow them away.”

Increasingly people turn to the Internet instead of phone books or newspapers to find restaurants, office-supply vendors or any kind of service. In addition to advertising opportunities, companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s America Online unit are tailoring their search products to include maps, narrowed neighborhood searches and storefront images to court small businesses with local audiences.

Douglas Fisher offers quite an impressive cookbook for building a hyperlocal citizens’ media service.

Chris Anderson, the Columbia grad student, gives us a topology for citizens media: Part I and Part II.

Roy Greenslade points to Chorley, an English town suffering from the lack of an official map. The local paper, the Chorley Guardian, used to produce one but it started a campaign to get the borough council to Give Us a Map.

But why not make a networked map? Start with Google Maps to satellite view of Chorley from above (who needs cartographers when we have satellites?). Then use a social mapping application like Platial to have local folks come in and fill in addresses and names; you don’t need everyone to do it, just that fabled 1 percent of nosy yet helpful neighbors. And they can add more than just names and addresses; they can review restaurants and warn you away from mean dogs. Or you can include dynamic information: report a pothole here. Google Maps will soon allow you find coupons for the local businesses. Then look at data applications like ChicagoCrime.org and layer on more information: arrests but also perhaps home prices. And, of course, because the UK has better mobile phones than we do, you’ll be able to see it all on your cell. While you’re at it, why not add on local tour podcasts (on your left, they’re having a nasty divorce….). By God, Chorley could end up with the best damned map on earth.

: And as a commenter points out, I should have included Up My Street.

And with GPS and a phone, people could leave voice or SMS annotations for any location in town.

What else?

LATER: More good ideas in the comments and here, too.

GoogleMaps is offering local merchants the chance to add free, printable coupons to their listings there. Google will make money later by offering with keyword search ads. And they’re priming the pump with ValPak coupons.

This is a stake in the heart of local newspapers. Mind you, most of these small, local merchants never could afford to advertise in newspapers anyway because they are too big, too inefficient, and too expensive. But one of the promises of online was the opportunity to go hyperlocal — not just for content but, importantly, for advertising, to be able to target ads so finely and to eliminate the costs of sale and production so that these small guys could finally advertise with a newspaper company. That was one hope papers had for replacing the advertisers who have disappeared in classified, thanks to the internet, and retail, thanks to consolidation, Wal-Mart, and the internet, too. Strategically, some on the newspaper business understood this. But tactically — take it from me — it was nearly impossible to implement because newspaper business people are incapable of thinking small. They’ve spent so many years just maintaining big accounts that had nowhere else to advertise that they don’t know how to replace them with hundreds and then thousands of smaller accounts.

We tend to concentrate on the editorial side of newspapering when we lament the lack of progress to update the institutions. But editors are catching on. The problem is that publishers often are not. And they don’t have bloggers and consultants and professors and other obnoxious people pestering them at every turn. They just keep going to golf tournaments while Google steals their business. It’s time to pester the publishers. Wake up, gentlemen: You have a new neighbor.

LATER: And here’s Peter Krasilovsky on the Google gambit.

This is how hyper local will work — when people care. From today’s Times:

When a state agency released plans for studying the environmental impact of the proposed Atlantic Yards project, a vast residential, commercial and arena development near Downtown Brooklyn, the response from critics was swift, brutal — and largely online…. But Atlantic Yards may well be the first large-scale urban real estate venture in New York City where opposition has coalesced most visibly in the blogosphere.

Check out this cool German yellow pages: an aerial photo-map application in which you can zoom in on any ‘hood and pinpoint businesses and then make a free phone call to them. Very local and nicely done. [via Fabian Mohr]