Wordblog

 I am following the debate in the US on the future of ultra-local (or hyperlocal) news with great interest. Like Howard Owens I feel it is a new term for something which has existed for a very long term and that it does have a future on the web. In response to an article in the American Journalism Review, Owens writes:

Hyperlocal journalism is just a fad term for what good community papers have been doing for hundreds of years. It’s a fad term for the kind of nuts-and-bolts community coverage many daily newspapers abandoned in the wake of Woodward and Bernstein. It’s a fad term for building sites enhanced with granular databases and user-generated content (Remember the days when every newspaper ran every obit for free, every police and fire call, and had the ladies’ social committee chairwoman writing a regular column?).

Hyperlocal journalism is nothing new. It’s just a new word. It’s paid before. It will pay again. The web presents new revenue challenges, but history proves, the market is there. We just need to figure out how to get there from here.

In the AJR story, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, examines the failure of backfence.com which consumed $3 million of start-up finance to live up to expectations. He asks if there is a future in this kind of business and says:

So far–and admittedly it’s still very early –the answer is no. A few of the estimated 500 or so "local-local" news sites claim to show a profit, but the overwhelming majority lose money, according to the first comprehensive survey of the field. The survey, conducted by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (affiliated with the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, as is AJR), documents a journalism movement that is simultaneously thriving and highly tenuous. While independent sites such as WestportNow.com (Connecticut), iBrattleboro.com (Vermont) and VillageSoup.com (Maine) have sparked useful civic debates and prodded established media outlets to compete more vigorously, the field as a whole is so far financially marginal. As the report puts it, "their business models remain deeply uncertain."

Yet, how much of the US debate is relevant to the UK? There are big differences in here in the structure and economics of the press and the demographics of the country.

Since the days of the small individually owned local newspaper, the way people live has changed. Mid-Suffolk where I live, for example, has one of the highest proportions of the population commuting out for work. Near universal car ownership also means that people travel out for shopping and entertainment as well as for work.

The community itself has a much weaker internal economic base that it did within living memory. The perilous state of rural post offices mirrors the changes in society.

The small local newspapers of the past were often produced a local printer who had branched out into a newspaper. In the 1960s I knew a one-man paper where the reporter/editor, an ex-compositor, returned from a council meeting, propped his notebook on a Linotype machine and direct inputted his copy.

For the printer, the jobbing and the paper worked together utilising staff and equipment better. The compositors had a more even flow of work and the woman in the office could take advertiisements as well as orders for business cards, posters and letterheads.

The advertising was local because most people worked and spent their money within the community.

That kind of business model is just not available now: a geographically defined community of residents is no longer contiguous with the areas where they spend their money. That presents a real challenge for anyone deciding to start a ultra-local news web site, despite the low production and distribution costs.

On the face of it this argues for the larger regional groups being best able to produce a series of hyperlocal sites enveloped within their existing coverage. It is what was suggested by Keith Harrison, deputy editor of the Wolverhampton Express and Star. He was quoted in Worldblog some weeks ago, but it is worth repeating:

If you promise ultra-local, you’ve got to be able to deliver it. The number of journalists we have [60] is huge compared with many other regional papers - but, even with that many, we can’t deliver ultra-local news all the time. To do it, we’re going to need another 500 reporters - we can’t take them on, they’re going to need to be citizen journalists. They want to get this information out there; we need to say “yes, we’ll be your electronic parish noticeboard, come give it to us and it will be in the Express & Star” - whereas, if you just set it up on your own, you’re only going to have a limited audience.
The only way we can do it is not by paying our full-time staff to do it but by giving our readers outside the opportunity to do it and for them to contribute and feel part of the newspaper.

That is, perhaps, the way things will go, but it is going to be difficult for larger businesses with their fixed overheads, corporate costs and staffing to do it effectively and profitably.

More likely, I believe, that small sites will develop, most will fail but a few will become successful establishing a business model that works but is unlikely to make their owners rich. Then, either the big groups will move in to buy them out or some form of franchise system will be set up to enable them to deal with the geographic mis-match of population and spending.