A VC - Latest Comments in Rethinking The Local Paper

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

LocalsGuide — Wed, 07 May 2008 04:58:24 -0000

Check out LocalsGuide.com
A model out of Southern Oregon.

It is a citizen journalism newspaper, created online and put into print monthly. It has been profitable from day one and had up close and personal pictures of Barack Obama and President Clinton's visit to Medford Oregon..several hours before any main stream media source did!

http://www.localsguide.com

Web 2 Print - Citizen Journalism - Hyper Local Publication

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Chuck Peters — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:07:47 -0000

I have had this thought, for the last several years, that our current method of creating newspapers is backwards. We, for example, try to cover a two county area primarily, another six counties to a lesser extent, and another eight counties to some extent. We do so in a way that is somewhat interesting to most people. Then we chop it up and put it online.

But, that is not how people live. I live in a rural neighborhood with a one mile circumference, am part of school, church and business communities, and several communities of interest. County lines don't matter to those communities. I would like to know items of significance to those specific communities, developed by people who care about the communities, to be available to me in meaningful context wherever I am. That is why I am trying to explore the organization and operating systems for a local information utility (LIU) advocated by API.

If we can make the LIU happen, then the newspaper, covering all of those counties could be organized to give me a broad overview of state, national and international events, not in detail, but so that I know they happened and can get more detail if I desire through the numerous news outlets that have made those stories commodities. The newspaper would have a local daily section, probably at a city level, that gave context and insight to major issues facing that larger community, with an emphasis on government, social service and community service issues, spiced with the best of the hyper-local and community of interest happenings. A weekly section could focus on the neighborhood. And, if I was interested in any of those stories, I could get deep and rich detail, prepared by those who cared deeply about those specific communities.

Brittanica, no stranger to disruptive change, has a forum this month, mostly on the struggles of the newspaper industry, and some hope for future states. Blogs alone won't give us the information to create, sustain and enjoy meaningful, high performance communities. The local content needs to be structured in a meaningful context, and who better to do it than the local media company, turned upside down and backwards?

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Andres — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 01:47:04 -0000

Thanks for the plug for BlinkGeo Stories. Yeah, it seems that the site was just too niche (geared towards geospatial news). Not sticky enough...but a worthwhile experiment.

You can check out http://www.mapdango.com and http://www.madpango.com/int... if you want to explore some local content all mashed up.

Cheers,

Andres

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

gruvr music map — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:44:17 -0000

another local-news site... this one apparently just shutting down though.
http://www.blinkgeo.com/200...

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

gruvr music map — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:35:08 -0000

Regarding incentive, I do think that there needs to be something besides 'common interest in local news'.
Another site similar to outside.in and everyblock is yourstreet.com - it aggregates local news. But I guess it's this 'pothole' problem that makes most of the news I find less than relevant.

The classic attempt at neighborhood civic engagement seems to be iNeighbors.org - they added features a few years ago to promote local bills for discussion, etc. And there were grassroots efforts - yet none seem to have taken off.

IMHO there has to be some potential benefit accruing to the proximity of a resource.
That seems to be what attracted critical local mass to craigslist - local classifieds.
Another such application is sharing - borrowing and lending items (or skills/knowledge) for mutual benefit, where you
need to be close enough to accomplish the loan transaction. That's what NeighborRing.org is about.

My favorite such application is local entertainment. After all, I may be mildly interested in the new sewer system announced 10 blocks away - but it's not that relevant to me just how close it is.
On the other hand, if I want to see some live music tonight - I DO care how far I have to travel, especially outside a dense urban setting. I may lack both time and gas money to go very far. That's what gruvr.com is solving.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

gruvr music map — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:16:55 -0000

Tim - I think there have been some interesting efforts in this space.
For example, NeighborRing.org and iNeighbors.org attempted exacty this: overlay a social network with labelled releationship links in a geographic area, then gain critical mass in that area by marketing as white-label social network
to a local association websites. There have been others as well - these are mostly pre-myspace or pre-facebook social network apps. There is an issue with privacy - it' better to use a lat/lon based registration system since that is approximate and anonymous, as opposed to address-based.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

gruvr music map — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:10:25 -0000

the technology for augmenting any UGC with location context has been around for a while: guess user location from their IP address (works fairly well in the vast majority of cases, but not all...) - this kind of location-sensing has been in use by GIS and mapping apps before the web. It looks like outside.in does that - although they guessed Rhode Island for me, off by about 90 miles.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

gruvr music map — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:03:45 -0000

Ian you make some good points on the local-ads problem.
It seems that plenty of companies have tried and failed at this (what happened to Zixxo -local coupon feeds?)
http://www.techcrunch.com/2... they seem dead to me.
Yet I count at least $77M pumped into local advertising ventures in the very recent past:
http://mashable.com/2007/11...
http://mashable.com/2007/10...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2...

AdWords, though, is a long way from being able to target ads correctly to true geo-Web apps.
The reason is familiar to veteran GIS hackers: googlebot pollutes its own index by self-identifying as
a web surfer from Mountain View, and AdSense uses googlebot metadata.

You need to do simple location-sensing for a good user experience in any localized app - that's pretty well established.
Otherwise the overhead of manually navigating to select location or taggin input becomes cumbersome.

So,any location-sensitive geo-app will typically display mostly ads for - San Francisco!
No doubt this is losing google millions of dollars per year, but I havent heard anyone complaining yet.

The primary solution for geo-apps at the moment seems to be to do "geo-SEO" and redesign the user experience to remove location sensing, which severely degrades many cases - but yields non-silly local targeting for adwords.

Google is clearly making strides to get the 'geo-Web' going with support for geoRSS, KML, etc. - but to really
start off right, they are going to have to re-design googlebot - or buy out a competitor who cracks this 'geo-indexing' puzzle.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

gruvr music map — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:27:39 -0000

I can't believe I just typed in a long thought out reply to this, and it got obliterated before I even posted it after I simply scrolled my browser window! urrrgh!

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Mike Stein — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:04:18 -0000

-- And there isn't enough of an incentive to produce hyperlocal content. If a mom (or dad) could blog for two hours every morning between dropping off her kids and going shopping and make $1000-2000/month doing that, we would see a lot more content getting produced. And who better to blog about the high school soccer game, the PTA meeting the night before, or the controversy about the new supermarket coming to town? --

I think I saw a sign for that job on the telephone poll right off the freeway exit on my way home from work tonight.

Clown.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

captain flummox — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:11:32 -0000

This is a subject near and dear to my heart since my first real job was as a reporter for a tiny-town newspaper. First, Idisagree with the comment that government information is a big yawn. Well, it's often presented in yawnworthy fashion, but the effects of government actions -- zonings, bond referendums etc. become a lot more interesting when your lifestyle, safety, bank account, education of your children or property values are at stake. So even though some of that stuff might seem dry, many citizens will care, at least by the time they're relatively adult. That's valuable not just as information for citizens but as a check on local governments who might behave differently knowing there more scrutiny. Secondly, though reporters don't get paid well, it does require a lot of time and a commitment to some level of objectivity. That's not to say any neighbor couldn't do it, just that every neighbor can't. The NYT has editors, and they've still had plenty of problems in recent years. Finally, and I hate admit this, but just because a community is tight doesn't mean its members should necessarily be trusted more than the general population. I'm a member of our Yahoo neighborhood group and a WOM recommendation I solicited from there turned out to be one of the worst and most expensive consumer experiences of my adult life. As for the tech of it , I agree that, dead simple is the only way to go.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

ppearlman — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:56:32 -0000

i love reading yr blog posts early in the morning and then checking back much later when theres a lull in the action to read the thoughtful comments....

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

timh — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:30:45 -0000

Local is hard!

I appreciate that information aggregation, dynamic organization of that information, and enabling discussion are all-important aspects to re-making the 'local paper'. With the proliferation of UGC and LBS/geo-tagging services becoming more ubiquitous online (including via mobile/gps) and integrated into more content/objects/data, finding and accessing this information is becoming much easier, as demonstrated by EveryBlock, Outside.in, Flickr and many others.

Now, how do you reliably connect people at the local level for information sharing about the pothole in the street, finding a reliable plumber, or about the house that got broken into down the street? To me the potential game changer at the local level would be to overlay a locally focused address-based social network (turning the white pages into an address-based social directory) over/under all of this local info.

Online Groups (Yahoo, Google, etc) are great at connecting people at the hyper-local level because they’re typically used by a group of defined neighbors who all know each other, and it’s access controlled…same with email listservs. However, these groups breakdown and lose their utility and scalability because that same access control limits the type of information members can access and reduces any single members ability to scale their local network beyond the defined group. The privacy controls and ‘information marketplaces’ of LinkedIn and Facebook aren’t locally focused but those services are great parallels.

Newspapers have active (and rapidly declining) subscriber lists that are still incredibly valuable and fully under utilized. Put an existing address-based subscriber list online within a permission-based social networking framework, making it easy for me as a subscriber to see and connect with other subscribers/members I know (neighbors and other people in the community I know) and trust who live near me. In addition to posting about the pothole on my street, when I need a realtor, plumber, painter, or want to find a good restaurant, that trusted local network would be my go to source, they already are...

To me the business model and revenue opportunities are clear, the hard part is getting to critical mass with an engaged community.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

fredwilson — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:27:02 -0000

That is where I hope this all is headed

But we need to make this super easy/trivial or even automatic to do

fred

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Joseph Kocherhans — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:22:24 -0000

Hey, thanks for the nice feedback, and for noticing my guitar videos! :-)

Yes, we *are* open-sourcing our software at the end of our two-year grant -- that's part of the terms we have with the Knight Foundation. Lots of excitement ahead!

Adrian @ EveryBlock

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Don Jones — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:16:00 -0000

Fred,

A couple of thoughts:

1. For Everyblock - the whole government information is a big yawn - maybe a few community activists care, every once in a while when something bad happens or threatens to.

2. More generally - The hyperlocal concept needs to be hyperEasy for people to contribute to - because it's about the hyperGranular level of details that people care about, as evidenced by the potholes concept. In order to get compelling, real time info, they need to integrate with something like Twitter, which allows people to be walking down the street and fire off a Tweet about something they just saw or did in the neighborhood. If the tweet can be geotargeted, so much the better. But it has to be short and easy - Twitter is the ideal example. Tumblr and regular blogs would also need to feed in as well. Voice-to-text would also be helpful to lowering the contribution barrier.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Heather Green — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:05:56 -0000

$2,000 a month is probably what a lucky local reporter gets. They basically do it because they feel strongly about it. Not to get rich. So another idea could simply be to buy the paper and start rejiggering it so that you could get more local input and make it more of a community effort.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Tom O'Leary — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:49:37 -0000

I suppose that the most hyper-local subset is the individual. If individuals tag all of their participation online with a zip code, it would be easy to aggregate it all. Of course, then we'd have a lot of noise that would require filters for each reader (not a big deal). If there was a mechanism for anyone publishing information online to add a zip code to every photo, blog post, blog comment, article, review - then they could be aggregated quite easily by zip. To be most effective, individuals should be able to tag content published by other sources in the same way. For example, if I come across a restaurant review on tripadvisor for Bellingham, Washington (where I live), I should be able to tag it with a zip for Bellingham while I'm reading it (perhaps a right-click, Add Zip function). That way, active hyper-local participants could add content to the mix that others contribute - others who aren't aware about the need to tag content for aggregation.

In this sense, every post, photo, comment, review, notice would be published like an AP wire: (98225: Comment or 98225: Photo)

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Ethan Bauley — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:29:20 -0000

EveryBlock is awesome. I reckon they are going to open-source the whole platform so developers could create an "EveryBlock" for every/any town. Open-source seems to be big at the Knight Foundation.

Incidentally, Adrian Holovaty [who won the grant] is a GREAT guitar player:

http://www.youtube.com/user...

His writings on XML and news articles are brilliant, too.

A friend and I co-wrote a Knight Foundation grant this year. The idea was to build a kind of "digital community service for college students" program. College students would earn credit or scholarship by, for example, attending city council meetings and uploading notes, or by scanning government docs.

There would even be a little Kiva-esque platform where community interests (individuals, local businesses, etc) could underwrite small grants and get custom local research.

They turned it down, but some of the details are at www.izzysmethod.com

If anyone wants to fund it, the team we have is brilliant! Holler ;-)

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Dan T — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:24:55 -0000

There are so many different audiences, interests, sources, and geographical variations to this problem that it will be fascinating to watch it develop. Discovering interesting content in mundane data sources is a brilliant idea by Everyblock. It reminds me of the data aggregation challenges associated with legal case reporting and background checking services - - which have to be developed court by court, state by state and agency by agency. I see the Everyblock idea of where to focus first . . .in NY and with a variety of public content services. It will be interesting to see where outside.in focuses > auidences, interests, sources, geographies or channels (news paper integration). This is a huge opportunity/problem . . outside.in's coverage in suburb looks really weak - - for obvious reasons.

Would they be better off to NOT cover an area until they have good information? i.e. only show certain zips like everyblock. Is it better to give someone a glimpse into the future with weak content or do you risk making a bad first impression and diluting a good story?

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Tom O'Leary — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:20:51 -0000

Interesting Fred - and I think I understand where you're hoping that all of this will head. Traditionally, local newspapers covered regions that span beyond individual neighborhoods or streets or apartment buildings. To cover these broad regions, they hired several beat reporters that would spend time calling people, visiting places and writing stuff about stories in that region.

What we need is more coverage in smaller regions by organic dwellers in those sub-regions. To do that, we'll need to shift the paradigm. Not easy. Rather than thinking of how many salaries we need to pay to get sufficient coverage for the East Village, we need to think about how we can encourage people from the East village to participate in publishing information about that space and smart ways of aggregating it all in meaningful ways - perhaps with unique results for each person searching (multiple criteria - i.e. food, east village, reviews)

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

twillerer — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:48:27 -0000

There is also a huge need on the advertising side that could easily fuel this approach.

Two observations:

1. I use Netvibes like a newspaper. I follow (i.e. skim) around 50 blogs / journals so I guess it's equivalent to a national paper
2. It's interesting how these competing local papers will have to work together in order to all succeed. That's becoming more prevalent in the world today, but still not fully accepted nor embraced.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Ian Bell — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:16:16 -0000

The presumptive business model around hyperlocal content is probably hyperlocal advertising, as you've alluded to in your post. I've worked with a number of companies over the years who claimed to be able to target ads right down to the block with various devious means, however creating the inventory in that scenario is not the real problem -- it's selling it.

Google AdWords can be used as a reasonably accurate spatial targeting tool (and will get better) I suppose, but most mom & pop small businesses are not sophisticated enough to use it. Those businesses are the bread and butter of the free weeklies, and those are the ad dollars that local and hyperlocal content creators will need to go after.

But here's the problem: the cost to sell an ad to a local pizza shop and to a broad marketer like General Motors is the same. The free weeklies hire and train folks who walk the neighbourhood, making friends with the owners, and selling to the small businesses lining the curbs: not your typical dot com sales methodology.

I recall the boiler rooms of Web 1.0 companies like CitySearch, Excite, and YahOo and the high cost-per-sale they ran, and I just don't see how the economics of the cost of selling the ads vs. the revenue gained from mom & pop advertisers bears out. Unless all these companies will all be selling to Starbucks (which doesn't need to advertise anyway) then those costs and revenues are not likely to align favourably.

So maybe the free weeklies are more friend than foe.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

brooksjordan — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:35:14 -0000

I was just reading these two pieces about/by David Simon, who is the creator of HBO's The Wire.

http://snipurl.com/1y5ec

http://snipurl.com/1y5ds

They make you think about what has been lost in the newsroom and how hyperlocal reporting could bring some of it back in a way that plays to the Web.

Re: Rethinking The Local Paper

Christian Sterner — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:53:38 -0000

Within my team's focus, there is massive financial incentive(s) to produce hyper-local content. It is the people that benefit the most from being a source for hyper local content that have the most incentive to create this type of content. I'm trying hard not to plug my company within the framework of this discussion, but will say without blinking that we have quite the momentum on the hyper-local video front, and-although we showed up early-there is a massive party brewing.

I completely agree, btw, that producing/aggregating hyper-local content is an act of connecting fragmented dots. It's a very, very fun and satisfying game as well!