Hyper-local is lekker

2009-09-04 10:42

Sometimes we internet geeks have a way of overcomplicating things. Take the word "hyper-local".  It may sound like something out of Star Trek ("Scotty, set phasers to hyper-local!") - but it really means any service or media related to a small geographic area.

We're talking about stuff like squabbles over potholes, sports results from schools and local gossip. If that mix sound familiar, it's because you probably already read about it in the free community newspaper that gets delivered to you weekly.

Until now the internet hasn't been very good at penetrating this niche and so community papers have thrived while their larger siblings have struggled to remain relevant.

But hyper-local may be starting to come of age in the USA, if mergers and acquisitions are anything to go by. In mid-August media conglomerate MSNBC snapped up EveryBlock.com, an experimental hyper-local news service that mines municipal data for use by citizens.

Then on 1st September Examiner.com announced it was buying NowPublic.com - a competitor in the aggregated community news (aka hyper-local) market - for an estimated $25m.

But despite all this chequebook capitalism will enough people really consume online community news to make it a viable business model? Surely news that local isn't really news to a community who have already heard it by word of mouth?

And just where does this hyper-locality end? Will we have a niche publication for 23 Elm Road where the breaking news feed is "Dad will be 15 minutes late" and the event for the week is "Visit Grandma - no whining"?

Facetiousness aside, community newspapers do serve an important function. Larger papers cannot afford to cover important local issues, and local businesses cannot afford to advertise to an entire city (or province), particularly when they only serve a neighbourhood.

But as worthy as this function is, it is just as much under threat from the internet as the rest of printed media. Bits and bytes are cheaper, faster and more interactive than paper. The fact that the internet currently does a bad job of hyper-local is almost a guarantee it will improve.

But the biggest threat to established community media is not computers but their smaller cousins, "smart" cellphones. These mobile windows into the internet are the future of hyper-local because citizens can both read and report news wherever they are. All that's missing is the technology to structure their conversations and reports into a useful whole.

And this is the key to the future of citizen journalism. It's not the community-minded die-hards who do news for free (although they will always be a part of the mix) - it's the collective voice, mediated by technology, to which everyone makes tiny daily contributions.

So if Fred is stuck in traffic on Elm Street he can tell the whole community in seconds, and virtually for free. And when Ntokozo gets a batch of beautiful fresh tomatoes she can let her customers know immediately.

And while online advertising is still a debatable business model for larger publications, hyper-local is proving to be extremely lucrative. Some estimates put local online advertising spend in the USA at $13.3bn for 2009.

So the situation looks win-win to everyone except professional community journalists who would appear to be out of a job. But in reality they will probably be more in demand than ever. They simply need to shift their focus from reporting information to filtering or "curating" it. After all, who knows the community better than they do?

- Alistair is Social Media Manager at 20FourLabs.

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