A few months ago, the town where I live was hit by a major storm. Luckily, no one was hurt; but we had experienced what is called a “macro burst,” and everyone was understandably shaken up by all of the fallen trees and downed power lines. The storm only lasted a total of twenty minutes, but the damage was extensive. As soon as things started to quiet down, my natural curiosity urged me to get outside for a closer look at the damage. I started talking casually to my neighbors, and then I decided to take a few pictures of the downed lines and fallen trees on my iPhone.

When I got back inside I showed the pictures to my wife and she suggested that I send them over to the local news. Of course, living in a small town, the closest actual TV station was thirty miles away in Boston. So I logged onto the website for WCVB TV Boston and created an account for myself where I could upload the photos. And sure enough, my photos ended up on the Boston local news. All in all, it took about one hour from the time that I sent them in for the photos to be broadcast.

When my son–who is a professional photographer–got home from work, he decided to take some pictures of his own. Needless to say, these were superior to mine and they made the news as well. You can see my photos here and the ones that my son took here. But more to the point, this whole experience brought me back to a conversation I had had a week earlier with my good friend David Holroyd, founder of eCast Videos. David had told me that he felt that in the near future, he didn’t think that newspapers would be “papers” at all. Instead, they would consist of several types of content at once: text to be sure, but also images, audio, and video, all in a robust and interconnected portal.

But it wasn’t until my town’s scuffle with a “macro burst” that I fully understood the importance of this idea. A multimedia portal on a local level would be able to combine the best from both the local capabilities of my town paper, and the slightly wider and less specific capabilities of the urban TV station. After all, it would have made far more sense for me to send the pictures of the storm to a news organization in my neighborhood rather than to a TV station thirty miles away in Boston. This way the information would be specifically targeted to those who are the most likely to consume it, the people who where actually directly effected by the storm.

And even more importantly, this portal could be a hybrid between professionally created content and user created content. Users such as myself could deliver the type of content that it is impractical for hyper-local newspapers to create such as large amounts of images of sudden occurrences or brief tweet-like constant updates, while the paid journalists could stay busy adding value to this content by digging deeper into the more complex stories. But one thing is for sure: the local newspaper of tomorrow won’t be a newspaper at all; it will be a robust and dynamic community portal.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

This is because journalists are the most important link in the news food chain. Let me explain:

I had this realization a couple of days ago while I was listening to a talk radio program. Somehow, the topic of daily routines came up, and the talk show host decided to describe his own. Each day when he wakes up, the first thing that he does is go outside and grab the daily newspaper off of his porch. Then he starts looking through it for interesting stories. After this, if he has time, he might browse the Internet for a little while, hoping to find a few more interesting stories, without a doubt also originally generated by a newspaper reporter somewhere in the world. He does this every day; and you know why? Because otherwise, he wouldn’t have anything to talk about on his show.

Now perhaps it should seem obvious, but just at that moment I realized that newspaper journalists are the backbone of talk radio, that talk radio simply cannot survive without them. Of course! As I continued listening, I thought back to the points that I made in [I Will Never Pay for "News Aggregation." Would You?] about the difference between journalism and news aggregation. I started to visualize a sort of “news food-chain” at work here in which nutrients—in the form of fresh, original stories—are passed from the beat reporters at the bottom of the food chain up to the newspapers and then up to the radio talk show hosts. But honestly, this isn’t even really just about talk radio’s dependence on newspapers, is it? The entire news reporting and aggregation system which includes local television stations, cable networks, Google news, NPR, blogs, weekly news magazines, etc. is all involved in this elaborate chain in which individual journalists—not pundits, but real every day beat reporters—are the most basic and most important link.

I think that it’s easy to forget just how essential this primary step in the process of getting news to the people is, especially when we are confronted daily  with a huge block of media coming at us from all directions that seems to have its own independent existence. We can be fooled into thinking that all of the derivative forms of news—from television, to blogs, and so on—can survive on their own. But while these media perform important services by organizing and commenting on news, they can’t survive without basic journalism, just as the higher species in the food chain can’t survive without the lower ones. Real journalism is that essential. If we don’t find a way to monetize the profession of finding and reporting on stories (journalism), the repercussions will be felt throughout the entire system, not just on the level of local news.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

Dear New York Times,

I recently read a blog post over at editorsweblog.org about your “hyperlocal efforts.” It cites your recent collaboration with Fwix in order to conglomerate news about particular local areas into a massive “local” news database, all from the comfort of your corporate ivory tower. Using Fwix’s software, you would gather all of the published news stories about each town or neighborhood and gather them all in one place. And honestly, Fwix has done some really great work here and I really admire their products, so please don’t take this letter as a knock against them.

There’s just one problem: “Conglomeration” has nothing to do with real local journalism! You’re not actually creating local journalism, you’re just cataloging what is already there. With all due respect, this is no more than a bad attempt at finding a silver bullet solution to the local news problem. All that you’ve done is use Fwix’s excellent ingenuity to throw together a bunch of articles using a software algorithm.

The value of local news go so much deeper than this. Hyper local is about actually being in touch with a community, something that only people who actually live in that community can do. You can’t do hyper local remotely. You need real local news organizations who actually know their communities to do this kind of work. These are the local newspapers in American communities who send their reporters onto the streets every day to report on what is happening and to foster a sense of connectedness within the community. Only a local organization can do this, not a computer algorithm alone, no matter how helpful it may be.

Local news is already working; its already doing what it does better than the New York Times ever could. The only problem is that local news agencies need to find a way to actually monetize this very special relationship that they have with their communities so that both can continue to thrive. And luckily, this is the easy part. The community is already there, and people already rely on local newspapers. We just have to figure out how they can make enough money to continue and thrive, and this is the mission behind Civic Edition.

So no, New York Times, your new hyper local focus is not local at all, unless by local you mean native to the 28th floor of your corporate office on 8th avenue in New York City. Despite what you may think to the contrary, real local news is still a necessity for the people who live and work in small towns and in non-centralized boroughs in major cities.  You can’t save local news by transporting it away from the communities where it is actually observed and reported on.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

Photo by Vidiot

A few weekends ago, the Boston area where I live was pummeled with rain. We received twelve inches of rain in two days, about one third of our average yearly rain fall. As soon as the flood waters started to rise, I was desperate to get up to the minute accurate information. So I turned on my TV and logged on to the internet. I was quickly able to find up to date information about Boston. There were pictures of cars toppled over and news about power outages, all of the things you would expect during a major storm.

But I actually live in a suburb of Boston, so what I really wanted was information specifically about my local town. I decided to start searching for flood information directly related to my suburb. Nothing.

There simply wasn’t any information posted yet about the flood even though it had been going on for several hours already. I wanted desperately to know if any roads were going to be out, if the schools were going to shut down early, and if there might be a power outage coming up. But there just wasn’t any information of this kind available.

And then it dawned on me that our local town newspaper only comes out once a week. Next weekend, I would be sure to find lots of information about the storm and pictures of fallen trees and flooded streets. But what good would it actually do me then? Sure, I would probably be interested in seeing the pictures, but the information itself would no longer be of any use to me. I needed it delivered to me in real time so that I could make decisions based on this information. I needed to know if roads were out so that I could decide whether or not to try to drive. I needed to know if schools were closing early so I could pick up my son. I needed to know if a power outage would be likely so that I could take the necessary precautions.

But I couldn’t find any of this information. If we were to invent the local newspaper for the first time today, wouldn’t we make sure to make this information available in real time?

In the last few posts I’ve talked about switching to a “community hub” model, a website where community members come to get up to date relevant information, and that, on an opt-in basis, actually delivers information directly to them via emails and text messages.

Under this new model, city officials could deliver updated information in real time about road closures, possible power outages, and public service closures in real time. It could even be set up so that officials and reporters could update this information straight from their portable devices, so that even if the power is out in their homes or offices, they should still be able to get the word out.

Sure enough, the power did go out at my house, and I had no idea what we were going to do for dinner. Here’s what I really could have used in this situation:

Let’s say that Julie, the pizza shop owner from our previous post, still has power on at her shop. She sends a text message to the community hub (with whom she has a monthly paid subscription) that says: “We’ve still got power here at Julie’s. Come down for a hot meal and free bread sticks with any large pizza.” The community hub then distributes this message to community members who have opted to receive updates from local food purveyors like Julie’s Pizza.

Let me tell you something. If I had received this text message to my mobile device while I was sitting at home in the dark with my family, you can bet that I would have been at Julie’s pizza within minutes!

Everyone wins in this situation: Julie gets business for her pizza shop, the local news hub proves its value to Julie who continues her subscription, and I don’t have to drive aimlessly around town in order to find the one or two restaurants that are still open.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

Photo Credit by minds-eye

As you know, the purpose of this blog is to answer the question, “What would the local news business look like if it were invented today?” And we are asking you to contribute to this blog, to critique and to add to our ideas in order to create a new business model for local news.

I recently told a friend about this idea and he said, “What? Are you crazy?” He simply couldn’t understand why we would put our business plan on the internet for people to look at and even steal if they want to. “You need to protect your ideas,” he said, “or someone else will take them.” As far as he was concerned, opening up this blog to a crowd of people is unconventional and risky. In one way, he’s right. Developing a business model in this way is unconventional. In the past, if you had an idea for a new business, you would guard it with your life and only share it with a few close friends, and even they would be required to sign non-disclosure agreements stating that they would tell no one.

But in the information age, this will no longer be the way that ideas are generated and explored. We are now in the age of “crowd sourcing” in which tasks are accomplished not privately by individuals, but publicly by torrents of people working together simultaneously. Two stories illustrate this point:

After this last Thanksgiving holiday, my son took a flight back to his university in Florida. After getting off the plane, he was disappointed to find his keys missing as he reached his car in the parking lot. Purely out of frustration, he made a quick post to his Facebook along the lines of, “[Explitive]… at  airport. left my keys in Boston and only spare is in dorm room!” Within fifteen minutes, he had friends messaging him back who where at the same airport offering him a ride. Within half an hour, two other friends who where headed down to the airport anyway had hassled his RA into letting them get his car keys from his room to bring them to him. In the past, he might have lost two or three hours trying to figure out how to get out of the same situation, but the power of the crowd got him out in a matter of minutes.

The second story comes from a post on Mitch Joel’s blog, Six Pixels of Separation. Mitch was stranded in Times Square in New York looking for a decent meal not completely saturated with grease. He sent a quick tweet to his Twitter network asking for advice and within a few minutes he had received “multiple recommendations [and] managed to eat a lightly seared piece of fresh tuna with vegetables at Blue Fin.” Once again, the crowd was able to solve a problem with ease that would have been difficult, at best, for the individual. This inspired Mitch to write and blog about the phenomenon of “crowd sourcing.”

Just as in these two examples, we believe that the solution to the problems faced by local news will not be found by an individual sitting alone in a room. Instead, we need to tap into the wisdom of the crowd by sharing and critiquing each other’s ideas until we find a solution, like a bucket brigade working to put out a fire. Doing things the old way is like having each person grab a pale and run half a mile to the lake and back with water. Each person has different talents in differing degrees, but this system doesn’t take this into account. But when everyone works as a crowd, you can have the stronger people get into a line and ferry the full pales back from the lake, while the weaker people form a second line taking the empty pales back. People with leadership skills can work to keep the line in order and make sure no one gets exhausted, and the very strongest people can be in the front throwing the water on the fire.

With crowd sourcing, each person’s individual strengths are brought to the forefront, while their weaknesses are eclipsed. This is what we hope to accomplish with Civic Edition. While the two of us bring our business experience to the table, each of you brings a different kind of talent. Some of you are reporters currently working at local newspapers, some of you have experience with social networking, and others may have experience with community organizing. We believe that together, our combined abilities will be greater than the sum of their parts. What do you think?

Think Outside the Newsstand

Joe

At 7:30, this Sunday morning, I was begrudgingly awoken by a plaintive and incessant beeping coming from a distant room in my house. It turned out to be the very last of our land-line portable phones, the sole survivor of our family’s slow conversion to complete reliance on cellular. We hardly ever use it, and so it had been somehow knocked under a couch where it was left to languish until it had run almost completely out of batteries. And now, on its last leg, it had begun to make this horrid noise, a cry for help asking me to place it back on its charging base.

As I was placing the phone back on its base, I pressed the talk button—purely out of habit—to see if there were any voice mails. Perhaps Publisher’s Clearinghouse had called to let me know that I was a finalist in their ten million dollar sweepstakes. No, even they would have probably known to call me on my cell phone. There was just one message, left on Friday by the mother of one of my youngest son’s friends. She was calling to say that her son, Johnny had left his backpack at our house and wanted to ask if my son would call and make arrangements to return it, otherwise Johnny could expect to turn up at school on Monday with a truck-full of his homework missing, and hell to pay.

I try to respond to all of my messages as quickly as possible, so I was a bit anxious that two days had already lapsed. I took down the number and quickly ushered the phone over to my son’s room where I found him quadruple-tasking on Facebook, Skype, iTunes and homework (or so I’m told).

“Michael,” I said as I laid the number down by his keyboard, “Johnny’s mom called and left a message on Friday saying that he left his backpack here.”

My son didn’t look up from his computer or down at the phone number. The situation obviously didn’t seem all that urgent to him.

“Are you going to send him an email then?” I asked, assuming that this must be how kids communicate these days, since he didn’t really seem interested in using the phone.

Then Michael turned his face around towards me and I saw his eyebrows raise and his nose wrinkle in a look of bewilderment. I suddenly felt a tinge of generation gap syndrome coming on.

“Email?” he said, “Email? Who uses email any more? I’ll send him a message on Facebook chat!” and with this he turned back to his “homework.”

My son is fifteen years old, and he doesn’t even use email, a medium which I still think of as new and cutting edge. How are we going to market to, inform, educate, and entertain an entire community of people like my son, who are already using technology that is two steps ahead of the rest of us? If people in this generation no longer use email, what are the chances that they are going to subscribe to, much less even pick up a local newspaper?

Today, people of different ages access information in drastically different ways. People who are fifteen have different expectations from people who are thirty-five, who have different expectations from people who are fifty-five, and so on. While many people in the older generations still want to be able to hold a physical newspaper in their hands and would be greatly inconvenienced to get their news online, there are also many young people today who have never communicated using physical media and are therefore not even a viable market for printed local newspapers.

Our media culture is in a hybrid phase. So if we are to invent the local newspaper business today, we need to offer a hybrid product that appeals to all different age groups at once. There is still probably quite some time before print media goes totally digital, but there is no telling just how much time is left. By establishing a hybrid model now, the local newspaper industry will be ready to transition to an all digital model when the time comes, ensuring that local news will still be available to future generations.

Think Outside the Newsstand,

Joe

As we started to go into in our first post, the question we want to answer with Civic Edition is: What would the local newspaper business look like if it where invented today? If we were to forget everything that we know about how local newspapers have worked in the past and build a system from the ground up for delivering local news to consumers, how would we do this?

As always, since our core knowledge is business, we want to approach this exercise as a business problem, and the first step in solving any business problem is market analysis. This consists of asking two very important questions. First, who are our customers? Well, at first, you might simply answer: “the readers.” But, in fact, you’d only be half right. While the readers are the most important set of customers, there is another set of customers, which the traditional local newspaper industry has dubbed “advertisers.” So there are really two separate markets of customers who we need to cater to, and this is something that is important to make clear. For now, however, we will concentrate on the readers, and we’ll devote another post to our friends, the advertisers, somewhere down the line.

The second question we need to ask in our market analysis is: Why are our customers interested in our product? Or in this case: Why do people read local newspapers? In thinking about this question I decided to take a survey of my friends and family to find out just what they get out of local newspapers (not the most scientific method, granted, but a start nonetheless). What I found is that there are three main categories of services that people seek to get from their local newspaper, and not all of them are really all that related to journalism (surprise!). First of all, people are looking for what I like to call “nosey neighbor information.” They want to find out who got arrested for public drunkenness this week, how much their neighbor’s house sold for, or how much public officials in the community receives as a salary. This is mostly trivial information, at the outer fringe of what might be called “journalism,” and yet these things are important to people. The second category is a slightly tamer version of the first, non-scandalous information about people they know, such as a story about a school field trip to a foreign country or the final score of the local high school football game. Even better is any story involving the name of a friend or family member. People simply love to see their own name or the name of someone they are close to in print. This information would still seem relatively trivial to an outsider, but on a local level it drives more interest than you would expect. Finally, the third category I noticed is what I call “timely information” information that either affects people in a practical day to day kind of way, such as school schedules, when businesses will be open, or official local government information; or on the other hand reporting and editorial work on pressing issues, the more hard journalism of the local newspaper.

Blogger and local newspaper journalist, Chris O’brien notices much the same phenomenon in his recent post, “Future of Local News About More than Paid Content,” this being that what we normally call “journalism,” hard reporting on key issues, is only a fraction of what people actually look for in a local newspaper. He notes that the local newspaper, at least at its height of popularity, was essentially a product that offered “about 50 different services for people. It helped people figure out where to shop. It delivered a boatload of coupons every Sunday. It helped them plan their weekend. It entertained them with comics and puzzles. It let them know what was on the school lunch menu. And along the way, it also delivered journalism.” In this way, the local newspaper is more than just a vehicle for information, it’s a sort of community hub. But as other online media have started to fulfill many of these functions, local newspapers are beginning to lose many of their readers, making journalism something of an innocent casualty of this overzealous technological revolution.

If the local newspaper industry were to be invented today, it would probably look a lot like a social networking site, only on a local level. In fact the parallels between local newspapers and Facebook or Craigslist are unavoidable. The same “nosey neighbor” impulse drives people to check their friends’ postings every hour, while their need to see their name in print drives them to make their own postings. And Craigslist users now find all of the personals and classifieds that they used to look for in the local paper online. While this is a big change that cannot be denied, local newspapers still have a hold on a major segment of the community who look to them for these kinds of services. What local papers need to do then is to continue delivering what their readers want while adapting to the new ways that they are beginning to use and access information, moving with, rather than fighting against the wave.

Our feeling is that we need to find a way to recouple hard journalism with all of the other types of services which used to be performed by local newspapers but are now being quickly absorbed by social networking sites. Whether you agree or not, we’d love to see your comments.

Think Outside the Newsstand,
Joe