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

If you were to ask an editor for a local newspaper what type of value local news provides, you would probably get an answer along the lines of: “Quality information is an intrinsic civic good whose value cannot ever be fully measured. Our constitution’s second amendment could not stand without the aid of this indispensable value.”

And of course, our wise editor would be completely right. But at the same time, she would be missing something fundamental about the nature of local news. In addition to these lofty “values” that it supports, it also has an economic value, one that that is simply cannot survive without.

Let me illustrate this point using a quote from an excellent article by Dave Chase: titled The next step in advertising: Local media as merchants? Dave writes, “Media companies should recognize their business purpose is to connect their audience with products and services the audience desires. Without that business purpose, they can’t fulfill their editorial mission.”

This “editorial mission” is the lofty civic value that newspapers strive to produce, the one that our hypothetical editor loves to eulogize upon. But without this other value, the newspaper’s “business purpose,” they simply won’t have enough money to stay afloat. And guess what? This means that all of that wonderful civic value is going down the drain right along with the failed business. The truth is that things are not as the legacy thinkers have tried to characterize them. Local newspapers do not have some this-or-that choice between delivering journalism or making money. Rather, they can’t possibly continue to do the former (conduct journalism) if they don’t find some way to do the latter (make money).and this model is starting to become outdated

This means that newspapers need to become more proactive in using their economic value to generate revenue. In the past, this was done through advertising, and the newspapers seemed to be okay with this “hands off” approach to monetization. But unfortunately, this model will soon cease to be profitable. And the new model to take its place will be for local newspapers to directly sell products to their communities. They will be in the business of bringing quality products to their readers; products that they known that their readers will be interested in, because they understand the nature of the communities they serve. Rather than simply being payed to display ads, regardless of their relevance, they will actually sell products that they know their readers want.

Once again, the legacy thinkers are certain to condemn this new tactic. Why? Because it forces them to become directly involved in their means of monetization  (as opposed to just putting up an ad and then washing their hands of its content). As Dave Chase wittily notes, the news industry seems to see the separation of news and business as more guarded than the separation between church and state! And this is exactly why big players like the LA Times have gone to so much trouble to not promote their affiliate links (last week’s post). They don’t want to admit that they are running a business!

But if the news industry doesn’t face up to the facts and start changing the way they think about generating revenue, they will be doomed to fail. If you can see any other way out, go ahead and leave a comment.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

Photo by Marcel Germain

I recently read an article over at sfnblog.com entitled “LA Times Adds E-Commerce Links, Revises Comment Policy.”

When I first glanced at this headline, I thought: “Great! Finally some of these big newspaper people are realizing that they need to monetize their content.” But then, as I proceeded to read through the article, I realized that, as always, the devil is in the details. The LA Times is doing the right thing; they’re just doing it in the wrong way.

So I went over to the LA Times website to see just how their new affiliate links (which by the way is what they are called, not “E-Commerce Links”) is working out for them. What I saw was pretty discouraging. They made absolutely no effort to actually promote this system, instead just putting it up and hoping for the best. And worst of all, whenever users actually click on one of these affiliate links they see a disclaimer:

“Clicking on Green Links will take you to a third-party e-commerce site. These sites are not operated by the Los Angeles Times. The Times Editorial staff is not involved in any way with Green Links or with these third-party sites.”

This is a major buzz kill for anyone who might have made a purchase after clicking on one of these Green Links. With “promotion” like this the LA Times can look forward to a negligible click through rate.

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a suggestion to the LA Times that I know they aren’t going to like: Stop thinking like a newspaper, even if just for a moment, and imagine your situation from the perspective of an “online marketer.” Sure I understand that you want to hold onto your integrity as a news organization, but if you want this system to work, you need to start thinking about the bottom line and stop intentionally distancing yourself from a system that could potentially make you some money.

Right now, the LA Times probably has a conversion rate for their Green Links of about .125% and they have roughly 10 Million regular readers every month. You can do the math for yourself, but essentially this works out to a profit of about $300,000 per year, assuming that each Green-Link-motivated sale will give the LA Times a commission of about two dollars (a reasonable expectation).

Now, this is by no means a bad thing. $300,000 could definitely save a few jobs or reduce cutbacks, but honestly, you could do a lot better, LA Times. At one point shortly before the recession, a website that I ran was getting a conversion rate of roughly 3%. If the LA Times could achieve this, they could make millions off of affiliate marketing. All that you need to do is actually get behind this system rather than apologizing for it. Here’s six things that you can do to make this happen:

1. Be Transparent
Promote what you are doing and don’t be ashamed about it. You are “selling” (no, it’s not a dirty word) products to your loyal readers. Be upfront about this and they will be much more likely to participate rather than simply ignoring your affiliate links.

2. Create a Video Explaining the System
Your readers will be far more likely to buy products through your affiliate links if you create a short thirty to sixty second video explaining the process. Be upfront with them. Say, “Hey, this is a great new way that we are creating revenue so that we won’t have to charge you for content. When you click on one of our Green Links and buy a product, we get a small commission, and you don’t have to pay any more than you normally would for the product. It’s a win-win situation.”

3. Post the Products that Have Been Purchased Recently
People are far more likely to buy things when they see that other people are already doing so. They hate to do things alone. But if you put up a side bar showing all of the most popular products that people are purchasing through the affiliate program, this will take away some of the hesitancy.

4. Write a Report on a Product and (God Forbid) Sell It!
I know that this is a taboo subject, but you guys are writers, am I right? You put words into pleasing combinations for a living. Why not channel a small fraction of this skill into writing up soft-selling product reviews that encourage your customers to buy through your affiliate links? If you really feel so uncomfortable about doing this yourself, hire someone from the budding new generation of internet savvy marketing writers to do the “dirty work” for you.

5. Let Users Rate and Make Comments on Products They’ve Purchased Through Green Links.
This is a free way to engage the power of your online community to generate revenue. When one user gives a positive revue of an affiliate product, others can purchase it with confidence.

6. Live by the Law of “ABS” (Always Be Selling.)
Don’t just tell your readers about the affiliate system one time. Tell them again and again and again. In my own experience with affiliate marketing, I’ve found that people need to be reminded over and over again about the system. Give your readers the basic rundown on the Green Links system with every chance that you get. The profits that you will reap as a result in the future will far outweigh any hesitancy you may feel in the present.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

photo by Steve Rhodes

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

I have a message for all of the corporate news organizations sitting in their ivory towers behind their mahogany desks:

Quit trying to convince people to pay money for content that you’ve been giving them for free for years! No one who is used to getting the news for free online is going to start giving up their hard earned money to get through a “paywall.” It’s just not going to happen. It would be better for you to simply light your articles of incorporation on fire and watch them burn. At least then we wouldn’t have to keep reading about paywalls and your stockholders wouldn’t have to go through the agony of watching the value of their investments go up in smoke while the rest of Wall Street thrives.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at this excerpt from the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism’s recent article, “State of the News Media 2010:”

Over all, the evidence suggests the outlook is difficult both for paywalls and for online display advertising. While most people have not been asked to pay for content, even among the most avid news consumers online, only about one in five at this point say they would be willing to pay, and this does not include less voracious news consumers. At the same time, the vast majority of those online, 8 out of 10, say they basically ignore online ads.

It simply will not work to just repurpose your same old content and then try to sell it to me! I’m just not going to buy it, and at least four out of every five avid news readers agree. Is there no one creativity left at the top of the industry?

At least, if you are going to start charging me for news, you need to find a way to actually add some value to it. You simply cannot just start charging more for the same product. People won’t stand for it. For example, look at the cell phone industry. It used to be that using a land line was the only option that people had, and there was a fair market price set on this service. Within a certain range, no one was going to pay more than that price. But then, in comes the cell phone companies who actually found a way to get people to pay more for phone service. They added the value of being able to use a telephone anywhere, even while you’re walking down the street (whether this is a good thing or not, I’ll let you decide). But what the newspaper industry is trying to do right now is akin to simply trying to charge more for the same old home phone service. People simply aren’t going to stand for it!

Here’s a crazy idea on me for all of the geniuses at the big news conglomerates:

You’re all so excited about Apple’s new toy the iPad, and you think that its going to save your business. Unfortunately, on its own, it won’t. However, by striking up a bargain with Apple, you might just be able to learn from what the cell phone people did back in the 90s. Get Apple to give away an iPod for free as long as the customer agrees to pay for a digital news subscription for one or two years. Now if you do that, I might just consider paying for news, but only because you’ve actually added something to the bargain. On top of this you can fill out your revenue by adding in affiliate sales techniques and information marketing. (If you aren’t sure what these are, just hire one of the many new marketing whiz kids who’ve been kicking your butt lately. They should be able to help you out.)

Oh and one last thing, don’t even think about trying to restrict my use of the unit. I know that this is temping, but this is a surefire way to lose customers in the long run.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

This post was inspired in part by Greg Sterling’s post over at Screenwerk Titled “Newsday Readers Don’t Pay, They Go Away.” Thanks to Greg for the great ideas!

Photo by Neal Patel

Or rather, can they afford not to? People in the digital world expect information to be delivered right away, as soon as events happen. But local news papers are too strapped for resources to make this happen. What’s the solution?

In order to deepen my understanding of the issues that we’re trying to tackle here at CivicEdition, I decided to perform interviews with editors at a few local newspapers. I purposely chose local newspapers that were in different stages of the process of opening up an online edition. Some were simply thinking about going online, while others were in the middle of the process, and a few had actually just begun publishing an online edition.

Here is what I learned:

Most local newspapers service very small communities–generally between 6,500 and 30,000 people–and they usually only have a small handful of full time employees to take care of the load of news that they need to deliver, although they may also hire editors and reporters on a per job basis. The most important thing however, that I noticed was that most of these local newspapers did not have the resources to take on additional staff for the transition to online news. They had to share the burden among their small teams of employees, usually without hiring even one extra person.

On top of this, these local news organizations are now expected to deliver information in real time, rather than once a week. Hence, they’re under more pressure than ever before. Compound this with the fact that many of the stories that they report on happen in the evening–when news workers expect to have their time to themselves–and you can begin to see how overloaded with work local newsrooms are becoming in the digital age.

For example, take a local high school baseball game. It used to be that reporters would publish the results of any big games in the weekly edition of the local newspaper, and this was considered reasonable by the citizens of the town or borough. But now, people expect information to be delivered in real time; they want the results of the game to be posted as soon as it’s over. The problem is that journalists are people who have lives and families just like anyone else. They can’t be available to attend every event that happens off hours during the week, such as a high school baseball game that doesn’t end until 9:30 or 10:00 at night. This is just too much pressure on these very small news teams.

I heard variations on this story from each of the local news editors that I talked to. As soon as they’d finished, I would ask, “But what about having community journalists take care of reporting on these kinds of things?” Not too surprisingly, this question earned an uncomfortable look accompanied by the retort, “Well, I don’t think that you would take your car to a community mechanic or want to be served by a community chef, would you?”

It seemed like they felt like I was suggesting that volunteers could successfully take over their jobs, which isn’t at all what I meant. So I went on to explain that what I’m suggesting is not to have volunteer reporters but to have members of the community who serve as information gatherers on the most basic level. For example, the coach of the baseball team could upload the score from the game herself onto the news website along with pictures if appropriate. These information gatherers would simply upload data to a form on the news room’s website, not actually write up full stories. Then the reporter would give interviews and perform deeper data collection at a later time, only when necessary.

After having qualified my earlier statement, I noticed that the editors were much more receptive to this idea. The only problem was that they didn’t have the technology to implement a system in which members of the community could upload information. The problem is not unwillingness to change, it’s a lack of having the right tools to implement change. Local news editors are not always tech savvy and so they don’t know how to make this kind of change happen.

However, what if a group of motivated people were to build an easy to use software model that could be implemented by even the least tech savvy local newsroom editors? Could this make a difference? Maybe this could be a part of what CivicEdition offers to the world of local news. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

Image by inju

I noticed a post on April 23rd on EditorsWebBlog.org about the struggle that newspaper websites are going through right now over whether or not to continue giving their content to Google for free. The author, Maria Conde, cites the internet consultant Arnon Mishkin, who is a major proponent of payed content, and who has been encouraging news websites to remove their content from Google. He argues that a large portion of Internet traffic doesn’t come from Google, but rather from regular, faithful visitors who respond to a news organization’s strong brand recognition.

However, Maria Conde notes that despite what Mr. Mishkin argues for, his own research shows that Google is still responsible for a significant portion of news websites’ traffic. In fact, according to Mishkin’s report as much as fifty percent of traffic to news websites comes from topic searches on Google. In her post, Maria Conde concludes that most news websites still need Google to generate traffic, unless they already have a deeply entrenched brand and a significant crowd of regular visitors.

I couldn’t agree more! Sure, a news website is a community (although it happens to be an online community) and should and will allow it to keep up a significant flow of traffic on its own using a strong brand. In short, Mishkin is right that branding works. But try suggesting to a “new media” consultant that you’d like to build your brand without using Google. He or she would look at you as if you had two heads, or perhaps no head at all!

Google is a central player in new media, meaning that any newspaper that wants to make the transition into this uncharted territory safely must adapt to Google’s new role in the industry. Otherwise, newspapers will go the same route as the music industry, which took a huge hit by denying the incontrovertible changes from internet technology. Seth Godin, in his book Tribes, describes how the music industry condemned itself early on to a slow and painful death by refusing to let go of business models rooted in the past. According to Godin, the music industry ignored two fundamental rules:

1. Don’t base your business predictions on market conditions that are better than the status quo. Chances are that they will never arrive. (Does this ring a bell newspaper guys?)

2. Don’t base your predictions on your past performance. If you’ve made money in the past, you did so under the market conditions of the past, which may have been categorically different from the market conditions of today.

The newspaper industry is doing the same thing today. They are repeatedly breaking these two rules. Instead of inventing new models that will work in today’s market, they are crossing their fingers and hoping that business will improve some time in the future. They are assuming that they can use models that worked twenty years ago and succeed in today’s market. This is an unfortunate repetition of what has already happened in the music industry, one that is sad and painful to watch. People haven’t been paying for news and don’t want to start paying for news unless they are given some sort of extra value. Trying to charge people for something that they are used to getting for free is simply not a viable business model.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

Image Duplicitous Soul from Vermin Inc

A couple of days ago I realized why news organizations are having such a difficult time getting people to pay for news. It’s because, most of the time, what we are fed by the media isn’t real reporting, it’s just news aggregation. Let me explain:

I was getting ready for work in the morning and I had the TV on in the background. My local news station was presenting a story about a 19 percent jump in foreclosures in March. As the newscaster read the report, a bar graph popped onto the screen giving a graphical representation of the gloomy housing figures. Their source was a “RealtyTrac” survey performed in April. All in all, the report took about thirty seconds and then it was over.

Just a few minutes later, the national morning news show came on. And their top story was—no surprise here—a summary of the RealtyTrac survey. Essentially, they gave the same exact report as the local news had given. Sure, the wording was a little different, and the report was slightly longer, but it contained the same basic information, gathered from the same source.

As soon as I got into my car to go to work I turned on my local NPR station (WBUR Boston, which is great by the way) and, surprise surprise, they were rehashing the same exact report, a few words changed, but the same basic facts from the same source. I think that I mumbled to myself something like, “This isn’t journalism. It’s just ‘news reading’.” I couldn’t think of any other term for what I was hearing. It’s no surprise that no one wants to pay for this stuff; the “reporters” don’t actually add any value to what they are reporting on. They are just repeating what has already been said.

If I were to put up a blog post titled “Forclosure Actions Spike Despite Federal Aid” summarizing the same story, would that make me a journalist? I think most of you would argue that it certainly would not! And yet, this is exactly the kind of thing that many people in the industry are arguing we should pay for.

Out of curiosity, I decided to do some research and find out where this story actually originated from. It turns out that “Disclosure Actions Spike Despite Federal Aid” was a Reuters story written by Lynn Adler, the one real journalist in this chain of repetition. Surely, all of the other organizations in this chain paid for access to this story, but in the end, there was only one real journalist involved. So congratulations to Lynn Adler on her excellent work. She’s the only person who actually produced something worth paying for.

But here’s where the plot thickens. After my morning workload, I got back into the car to head out to lunch. The same exact story was on WBUR’s “Here and Now” once again. It started out just the same as the others. Jane Clayson was in for Robin Young that day and she began by repeating the same facts that I’d already heard three times that day. I could practically mouth each of the words as she read them:

“RealtyTrac reports the number of homes lost to foreclosure soared by 35 percent in the first quarter of 2010, compared to last year. That’s the largest increase in five years.” Etc. etc. I was just about ready to switch to another station.

But then, Jane did something different. She took the story further by conducting an interview with Stella Hopkins of the Charlotte Observer. She had taken the time to develop a piercing set of questions in order to use this interview to take the story to the next level. “Ah ha!” I thought. “I’ve found another journalist!”

The only parts of this process worth paying for are those conducted by the original journalist, Lynn Adler, and by Jane Clayson who made a real attempt to expand the story. Everyone else was just taking part in “news aggregation,” which is something that I don’t pay for, and will NEVER pay for.

What do you think? Am I right, or am I full of it? Leave a comment to let me know.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

image by AMagill

I’m frustrated these days. Here’s why:

My three sons—ages twenty-one, eighteen, and fifteen—don’t use email. I’ll send them emails about a family event a week ahead of time and not get a response until afterward. At first, I just thought that maybe my kids were blowing me off (this can happen to parents of teens and young adults), but then I began to notice a pattern arise out of this madness. So like any good citizen, I decided to perform a “scientific” test.

I wrote the following email on Friday March 26th at 1:46 pm which stated:

Subject: This is a test to see if you use email.

Dear Kids,

If you respond to this email, I will pay you $20 cash.

Love, Dad

By offering a cash reward, I could be assured that my results would not be spoiled by laziness on the part of the reader. And the results where just as I expected: the younger the kid, the slower the response.

My twenty-one-year old responded in just over an hour via his Black Berry at 2:57 with “That would be great thanks.” I saw him pulling into my driveway a couple days later as I was heading out to work and slipped the twenty through his driver side window.

My eighteen-year-old responded four and a half days later with “I do read my email once a week so pay up.”

As for the fifteen-year-old, I have yet to hear from him as of the writing of this post. However, I did overhear my oldest son telling him that he could make a “quick twenty bucks” if he was willing to split it fifty-fifty.

Email is fading quickly from use among the generation of “millenials,” people born between roughly 1984 and 2000. These kids and young adults simply don’t use email anymore. Notice that even my oldest son, who responded quickly, did so from his Black Berry, not actually via email. And these millenials are the people who we will be marketing local news to in the near future. This being the case, it is important to understand just how quickly the technology gap between them and traditional media is forming. Even “new media” like email are fading from use.

How can we reach people with local news who prefer to use media which are not one, but two or three, technological generations ahead of the old medium of print?

Now I know that my methods in this inquiry were not completely up to scientific standards, so I decided to create an expanded test using the free Survey Monkey tool. (No, I’m not offering $20 to anyone in the world who responds to my emails, sorry.) But this time, I catered the test specifically to questions regarding news and the consumption of information.

The survey contains just four short questions:

1) Do you subscribe to a newspaper?  Yes or no.
2) In the past month, How many times have you read a newspaper?
3) How old are you?
4) How do you get information about current events?

I geared the survey specifically towards millenials, so that the oldest option for question number three is “25 years old.” After creating the survey, I asked my three sons to post it on each of their facebook pages. I’m planning on waiting a couple of weeks for the data to stream in. But as soon as this happens, I’ll publish the results of the survey so that we can all see if they are consistent with what I’ve found so far.

One last note: my wife was upset that I didn’t send her an email with a cash reward. (I knew that she would read it since she’s not a millenial.) However, I can give her the credit for coming up with the great title for this post.

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