The classic, and perhaps only business model supporting hyperlocal journalistic efforts like Patch.com and other local media is local advertising. On StreetFightMag.com last week, Ted Mann, Digital Development Director for Gannett NJ, discusses why Gannett’s hyperlocal experiment InJersey.com failed. The main and obvious reason is simply local advertising cannot adequately cover expenses. So…

What if local media were positioned as a community service without the advertising model?

Can hyperlocal media thrive and engage the community as a good will service?

1. The value of hyperlocal is in the information

I paraphrase from Alex Salkever’s June 24 article Hyperlocal’s Automated Future. The website platform and curation tools now exist for any individual or business to develop local media cheaply. A WordPress blog is an easily customized platform for anchoring the news system. Curation and aggregation tools, plus hyperlocal social applications like See Click Fix can provide a panoply of local interest content.

Although still an immature technology, an automated news aggregation and publication service like paper.li or Twylah can be embedded to display in newsprint “Flipboard” format.

2. It’s not just the website… hyperlocal spans across social and mobile media

A community media service must now span across all social media for hyperlocal engagement. Twitter, a perfect media for broadcasting real time local news, can be used to curate the best local Twitter feeds into lists.

Facebook is becoming the arena where the locals will gather to discuss local news, events, even the Daily Deals around town. (Ted Mann’s point #9 – use Facebook as the local watering hole). The social “metrics” for engagement are high for local news:

3. Partner with everyone

Ted Mann’s #4 recommendation for developing hyperlocal content. Companies developing applications serving hyperlocal audiences, like SeeClickFix above, want to partner with local publishers to gain traction. Local publishers want to partner with new application developers to deliver unique local content to their audience. It’s mutually beneficial to overlay new social content, even social commerce applications across national hyperlocal networks. Even better if there is a business model associated with the application for revenue share opportunities between publisher and application provider. One long term mission of a national community service network is to create exposure for a variety of social hyperlocal applications that would not normally get exposure from traditional media.

4. Support the business community

Local businesses are integral to engaging the community because they have the commercial incentive to create content that helps to publicize their business, directly or indirectly. Local food critics own restaurants, real estate columnists are Realtors. Yet, the classic advertising model forces them on the sidelines because that kind of publicity has tangible dollar value that traditional publishers need to extract. So why not support the business community by embedding the most compelling websites and blogs of local merchants into hyperlocal media as content free of charge?

A full website presence has far greater utility for the featured businesses and for the reader than a tiny banner ad selling at $500-1,000 per month. Engage the business community, and they will make the effort to engage locals because 1) it’s free to them, and 2) it’s their marketing vehicle.

5. What is the business model anyway?

Hyperlocal media systems like Breaking News are easy and cheap (often less than the cost of a one-month banner ad) to develop for individuals and groups wanting to create a community media presence in their city. The business model for the owner is not to make money, but to serve the community and be positioned as a local media star in order to enhance the business development prospects of their “day job”.  It’s the same rationale for serving as a Chamber of Commerce president, or even 50 years ago, starting your own local newspaper; it just helps your career. The owner of the community media service pays it forward.

6. What is the impact of hyperlocal media as community service?

The greater impact of the community media service model may be disruptive. The perpetual discussions revolving around how to monetize local journalism have yet to point to a cashflow positive solution. An automated media model that requires few resources and supports the local business community can put pressure on traditional local publishing models. Yes, the content is curated, aggregated and automated, but it’s real time local information that readers want. In time, the new social local applications now being developed can be easily added to supplement the information stream and generate the local engagement needed to survive, even prosper within the hyperlocal media landscape.

Reference:

Local community news has always been hard to produce profitably with scale. Local news is only relevant to those who live within the community, and it makes cost per thousand based advertising models untenable when readership may log in the hundreds. Without a revenue model to hire editors and writers, the cheapest way to source local news content is either through volunteer reporters, or aggregation of local media by engines .

Problems with Local News Aggregation Technologies

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick recently posed the question “Why haven’t neighborhood news technologies worked out?”

I sure hope someone can nail it. Give me the news about my neighborhood, please... I care about what’s happening in the neighborhood around me and I want to see the fabulous new technologies of open government data, online news syndication, social networking and data mining all put to service to fulfill hyperlocal news wishes and dreams I didn’t even know I had yet.

From the article’s comment stream, it seems news aggregators like Outside.in, Fwix, and EveryBlock have three problems:

1) Local news presented by algorithm isn’t customized to the needs of the reader and therefore, sterile and/or irrelevant.

2) Most local news is inherently uninteresting. Ever watch a local TV station and care about anything about the car wrecks, murders or city council meetings covered? It’s lower grade information that doesn’t enrich or improve our lives as much as the content we generally seek on the web.

3) Aggregated local news lacks the social element, whether it be real reporters or people in the community engaged in local discussions.

1. Local News needs manual curation

The news needs to be right. Fwix often reports irrelevant news; Rocklin is 80 miles north of Modesto, CA (see image)

Engines query for local articles via RSS but they require a human team to identify the best feeds in every city and continually update these feeds. Feeds can be sourced not only from mainstream media, but also blogs, Twitter and other social media links, and eventually Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and other geo-localized media sources as they attain credibility by reaching critical mass of local participants.

2. Local News needs more content

Again, it’s hard to produce content without somebody paying for it. However, there are new producers of local content that haven’t yet made an imprint as local media sources. Civic organizations, local companies and merchants like Whole Foods have websites and blogs that broadcast timely information people want to know about, but may not have RSS feeds for simple aggregation. Companies like Nozzl Media and DataSift are developing ways to aggregate and filter this kind of content. Finally, locals using Facebook groups, Yelp and Foursquare are documenting what’s happening in their city, and their reviews are starting to be included in sites like EveryBlock. People will eventually find where their friends are congregating and which stores are popular through the aggregation of these geolocational systems (see Checkinmedia image)

3. Local news needs personalization

Although some people may like crime reports for their city, all I really want to know about the 1/2 mile radius around where I live is 1) all the daily deals merchants in my neighborhood are offering, 2) what’s playing at the theaters, 3) the Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Safeway circulars, and 4) where all my friends are congregating around San Francisco. That’s it, at least for today. Once the content sources from deals services, supermarket chains and theaters, and geomedia are aggregated, this kind of personalized local portal becomes relevant to daily life.

4. Local News needs to be social

Readers are motivated to participate in social news for two reasons: visibility and content ownership. Just like yesteryear’s “Letters to the Editor”, readers comment frequently on mainstream media news sites like Huffington Post or LATimes simply because they know their input will get read by thousands. News aggregators (like EveryBlock, right image) have a hard time pulling in conversations simply because there is nobody to converse with!

To succeed in gaining participation, hyperlocal news sites need on-the-ground ringleaders in each city to engage their communities and promote participation. But ringleaders need compensation. Fwix and other news aggregators own every city and provide little incentive for others to own and grow content for them. We modeled The Breaking News Network as a kind of franchise that facilitates the creation of a local media resource by individuals and groups in a city, and gives them city/community ownership so they have vested interest to grow their properties.

Patch hires editors for each city who can spur participation in their community, but is currently burdened with a high expense / small revenue model that is under scrutiny by Business Insider among others.

5. Local News needs to be easy to read and digest

The  popular Flipboard for iPad validates the concept that people like reading aggregated and personalized news in a newspaper format. Reading within familiar typeset frames is easier than perusing streams of news that characterize news aggregators like Topix or EveryBlock. There’s opportunities for aggregation and presentation technologies like paper.li to make it easier for news to be curated and read in this more reader-friendly format. For example, BreakingSFNews.com (image below) embeds paper.li as another way to read about SF news.

The powerful launch of Google Buzz (Mashable | Google Buzz has completely changed the game) last week signals the arrival of the Real Time Web as a truly new media. It’s been well documented that Twitter has established itself a breaking news source. Google Buzz, Facebook and Twitter form a triumvirate channel for sourcing news media that will continue to grow in influence.

The real time web implies that online news will flow more and more through applications, not websites. The problem facing mainstream media is their dependence on traffic through their websites for advertising revenue.

The journalistic media on the other hand continue to try to erect walls that halt traffic flow through their websites, either by charging subscriptions (New York Newsday gets 35 subscribers after three months), by limiting access to their content by aggregators (Murdoch’s gambit with blocking Google from indexing Sky News content), or simply by not providing an RSS feed for syndication (Santa Barbara News Press and many other local publications).

Social media thrives on RSS to find, deliver and syndicate news from journalistic media, and it directs traffic back to the news source.  If the traditional news media continues to ignore social media sourced breaking news, they risk becoming irrelevant to their communities who demand this real time news. People will eventually find that real time news directly from their community via one of their social networks and news aggregation applications.

With the sudden closure of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News Friday and the publication of its epitaph video, the past week has been filled with speculation on the future of newspapers. David Cohn, of Spot.us, a collaborative funding source for journalist assignments, is chronicling topical articles on his Google Reader shared items. Recommended.

In sum, the future existence of newpapers must always return to the revenue model. The most radical being proposed is paradoxically a return to the old model of paid content. Walter Isaacson proposed the return of walled subscription services on February 5 in Time Magazine, and newspaper publishing company Hearst and Cablevision, owner of Newsday both just announced walled content initiatives.

The fifth estate’s laments focus on the value of their trade as monetizable, i.e. news is worth paying for. The problem with their argument is “free” news will always exist – through newspapers and journalists that won’t wall their content, through CNN, and via the bloggers and Twitterers who will distribute the free content. What else could a Newsday or SF Chronicle, or your local paper, add to the news that someone will pay for? Think about that.

The return of walled subscription services will put journalist value in a “put up or shut up” position that could threaten their entire value proposition. Duncan Riley dares newspapers to wall in content:

Why? because it will drive their readers to other sites, including blogs, and that’s good for business if you’re in the web publishing business.

It might also once and for all prove that the blogosphere doesn’t need newspapers as a primary source of news

Turning back the clock to the old world business model in which “we, the media, own the content” makes little sense. There’s a hint of disintermediation frustration behind the media’s stance. We know many citizen journalists already write about ideas and topics they know much better (through their life experience) than the beat reporter, and it remains to be seen what really will be called “news” in the future.

FIRST, WHY ARE THERE NO NEWS PRODUCERS ON TWITTER?

Twellow is the best application to find Twitterers grouped by occupation. I perused through the News category – noted a lot of freelancing journalists and some reporters, but no news producers or editors.

Twitter makes it easy for a community to tip the news media

News producers should understand that news sourcing has become social because anybody can now feed them story ideas. Moreover, news producers should FOLLOW others so their potential citizen news sources can DM (direct message) them with story ideas and breaking news that are best transmitted privately. News producers can provide journalistic value by positioning themselves as media hubs in their community.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA HIDES BEHIND THEIR CALL LETTERS AND BROADCASTS ONE WAY

Advice to mainstream media – don’t hide behind your call letters or mastheads on Twitter – use your real reporter and producer names like WUSA9. And don’t arrogantly just use Twitter blatantly as a one-way broadcast media- this is old media think and keeps your brand isolated from your constituency. Following others who you respect as news sources will expand the distribution network you will leverage as a media hub. And those you follow will be appreciative.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA STILL CALLING TWITTER UNRELIABLE NEWS SOURCING

Granted, individual Twitter sources are not trustworthy at face value. What makes citizen journalism credible is the aggregation of individual sources into a collective, accountable voice. This is what makes citizen review sites like Yelp more trustworthy than the Twitter-like pronouncements of a Zagat‘s restaurant review; Yelp’s statistical samples are large enough to prove its results, and Zagats is a black box.

Citizen sources are much closer to breaking news events (as seen in Mumbai and Gaza), and the “reporting” or research / interpretation of the news can be performed by either mainstream media or citizen sources. Dave Winer makes the case that the social media does vet and report news (his diagram above).

It seems obvious that once mainstream media surrenders its position that only they can report news by sending out salaried news crews and cameras, real economies of scale (think free) of news sourcing happens. Mainstream media can then add quality (and value) by filtering interesting stories arising from a magnitude more citizen sources than they have now. Twitter is, in essence, a massive extension to their 800-”hotline”. Now, if the media would only listen.

KUDOS TO MAINSTREAM MEDIA WHO ARE SERIOUSLY EXPERIMENTING WITH TWITTER

Let’s congratulate a few news media companies and individuals that have put together a comprehensive Twitter presence.

Tori Blase, CNN – the only major news producer I see out there

Dave Courvoisier, KLAS TV anchor, Las Vegas – thanks for your sincere offers of help

WUSA9, Washington DC

Patrick O’Brien, WUSA Web Director – Patrick introduced me to the whole WUSA team on Twitter.

Peggy Fox, Anchor

Stephanie Wilson, News Producer

Angie Goff, Traffic Anchor

Lindsey Mastis, Digital Correspondent

Lesli Foster, Consumer Reporter

Kim Martucci, Meteorologist

Sara Walsh, Sports / Skins Uncensored

Andrew Nystrom, LA Times Social media and tech blogger – Andrew seems to be coordinating a massive effort to build media channels by category at the LA Times.

LATimesTweets lists all 59 LA Times Twitter feeds

Related articles:

The New Web 2.5 Opportunity: Create Media Hubs

The Future is LA Times.com, not LA Times the Paper

Slow Death of Traditional News Syndication

The mass media – CNN, Marketwatch.com, NYT.com – all depend upon delivering “breaking news”  relevant to their audience. It’s been that way since “Extra, Extra, Read all about it”. The “breaking news” play is evident in the institution blog world with properties like Engadget and Gizmodo warring to get the latest tech toy published first.

Breaking news is critical for making time sensitive purchase decisions – nobody should buy GM stock, purchase a home or car, or lock in an interest rate without checking what is happening in the markets and how it impacts their purchase decision.

How Breaking News Real Estate Sites Become a Mass Media Property

The new breaking news websites like Homescopes, a real estate site of blogging Realtors devoted to granularly chronicling the Northern California housing marketing in real time, is a far better resource for analyzing this local market than any journalist writing a weekly real estate column. Homescopes is planning to expand to having 100 real estate “journalists” covering this regional market. Once this happens, Homescopes becomes a bona fide source of professional real estate opinion, and can now leverage their collective knowledge base by teaming up with the traditional mass media for supplemental content delivery. Imagine Homescopes as a part of the San Francisco Chronicle coverage of the real estate market in the Bay Area… Homescopes’ agents benefit from exposure in a mass media publication that is akin to free advertising.

In addition, Homescopes will be able to leverage their portable social graph – readers can log into Homescopes through their Facebook account via Facebook Connect or via similar channels like Google Friend Connect. Like all social media plays, these various Homescopes social networks will build on the trust and credibility that develops among the membership.

Conclusion

Homescopes is singular in the landscape of independent real estate sites by providing breaking news cooperatively and in hyperlocal detail by its participating agents. No other real estate sites – Trulia, Inman News, Realtor.com – can provide this level of local detail in a news feed based format. Simple to build at little cost, all it takes are ringleaders who see the opportunity to replicate Homescopes in their markets.

Related articles:

Homescopes – providing breaking news for the Bay Area housing markets

Entrepreneurial Real Estate Marketing

Incorporate “Breaking News” into the Website and Make Them Compelling Reads

The Portable Social Graph

The age old (at least during this decade) new media question: is citizen journalism journalism?

Tom’s Tech Blog decries Twitter as an unreliable news source, and therefore not a news source, receives backlash from prominent bloggers:

Yes, Twitter is a Source of Journalism – Mathew Ingram

I Can’t Believe Some People are still Saying Twitter isn’t a News Source – Michael Arrington, Techcrunch

(Why is Twitter Unreliable?) The facts are often wrong.

This is the same argument that mainstream journalists used against blogs when they rose to fill a void in the news over the last few years. Yet even the NY Times admitted years ago that blogs were an important news source when disaster struck: “For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.”

But blogs are nothing compared to Twitter, which lets anyone with a cell phone instantly update the world with what they see and hear, via the simple and ubiquitous text message.

Sure, lots of Twitter messages are flat out wrong and can spread disinformation. But as Ingram notes in his blog post above, other people tend to immediately correct those errors. Bad information is quickly drowned out by good information.

CNN provides examples for both sides of the argument with Tweeting the Terror – How Social Media Reacted to Mumbai – remarkable Tweets emanating from the battlefront as well as wayward rumors and noise that questions Twitter information credibility.

Mumbai Attack Aftermath, Detailed Tweet by Tweet – Wired Blog

The simple conclusion is the fact that all citizen journalism – Twitter, cell phone conversations and pictures, Flickr – potentially contribute to the illumination of breaking news. The responders are the first on scene, minutes to hours before the mass media reporters, and news credibility simply requires filtering by both other citizens on scene and the trained media. There’s really no argument here.

New York Times states Mainstream Media News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites. It’s a portal strategy to leverage their print and TV brand names, and keep them relevant as comprehensive news sources. The advent of Web 2.0 news aggregation communities like mainstay Digg and Social Median have legitimized news aggregation and sharing across a reader community. MarketWatch has a reader community.

In June, I published on my sister site a slideshow explaining how MSM is moving from a content generation business (journalism) to a content distribution business (media by definition).How Mass Media is Embracing Social Media

Opening up Twitter Networks

Now, MSM should develop their Twitter network and show their readers which Twitterers are news generators. The NYT is still won’t link out (follow other newsmakers), but the SF Chronicle does: