In my quiet little hamlet in Central Massachusetts, a battle is brewing.
This battle is not about property lines, It’s not about the Thanksgiving Day football game rivalry.
This battle is about local news.
It’s called hyperlocal news, and it’s happening on a computer near you.
While the big newspaper conglomerates are drying up and laying off reporters, local newspapers are thriving. In particular, online hyperlocal news sources are multiplying and taking root where the larger newspapers have pulled up their stakes.
Residents in my Central Massachusetts town of 33,000 used to get the news from three newspapers, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, and the smaller Worcester Telegram and Gazette. As blogging and online news feeds bloomed, traditional newspaper revenue shriveled. So too did news personnel head counts and the ability to go out and gather local news.
Currently, The Boston Globe has a WestWeekly section that comes out once a week, lumping my town in with about ten other local communities. We're hardly ever mentioned by name, save for a notice of the next Selectmens' Hearing or an upcoming bake sale. There might be a blurb about a local collegiate athlete who made honor roll as a sophomore at Oberlin College. This kind of coverage is not very encompassing or interesting, unless you know a particular someone paying tuition at Oberlin.
The Worcester Telegram and Gazette has more local coverage, but again, my town is one of more than a dozen communities served by this newspaper. We get scant attention and we have to pay for it thanks to a newly implemented online subscription fee. This ship is sinking all the faster I fear.
The vacancy left by the Big Guns abandonment has resulted in multiple online, hyperlocal outfits clamoring for attention and local advertisements (and revenue! Actual revenue!). In my town we now have a wickedlocal site, an online newspaper run entirely by the local real estate agent extraordinaire, a topix site, (a clearinghouse for articles pulled from the web), a weekly Community Advocate online paper and an online daily, a subsidiary of the CentralMassNews.com.
Now Patch.com is coming for a slice of the Central Massachusetts pie.
Patch.com, which is owned by America On Line, is infiltrating Massachusetts, looking to start hyperlocal, online newspapers in multiple communities, including mine and several surrounding towns. Patch just announced it has over 100 sites nationwide and hopes to have 200 within the next year.
Robert Niles, contributing writer to the blog Online Journalism Review, is skeptical about Patch.com and whether a large, national outfit can be profitable in the small, hyperlocal arena. “Beat The Press," moderated by Emily Rooney, recently had a segment about hyperlocal coverage and the implications for journalists, including questionable reporting quality, low wages for the workers and the impossibly high demand for practically instantaneous output. Take a look:
It remains to be seen whether one town can support this many online news outlets. As a resident, I'd rather have more coverage than no coverage. As a writer, I'll hop along for the ride.
But is it quality coverage?
A popular local blog, run by a politically active resident, abruptly shuttered recently, for vague reasons. News can be hyperlocal, and so too can be neighborly grievances and gossip, apparently. The word around town is that an incident occurred at an area coffee shop. The said incident reportedly involved the blog writer, the real estate agent extraordinaire and an anonymous comment posted somewhere in the blogosphere.
I’ll have more information about this incident as soon as I check in with my hyperlocal news sources.
The Take Home:
Hyperlocal is here! Hyperlocal is here! Extra! Extra! Read all about it here! And here! And here!
For those who want a little more hyperlocal discussion, check out this blog that is devoted entirely to online journalism, The Online Journalism Review:
http://www.ojr.org/
Disclosure: This author is currently employed by Patch.com. Nothing was exchanged, no money, gifts or warm fuzzies, with regard to this post.
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