Living La Vida Local

What's your hyperlocal strategy?

If you're a newspaper publisher or editor, or a TV station exec, you'd better have one. Because competition is coming fast for your most local business, providing news and information to your readers and viewers and monetizing that with advertising from local businesses. That's your strongest remaining franchise, and it's already under siege. But you ain't seen nothing yet.

Google is now fine-tuning Google News to deliver local headlines. Topix has been doing a version of this for a couple of years. Meantime, upstarts that traditional publishers have probably never heard of—Outside.In, EveryBlock, YourStreet—are doing ever-more-interesting aggregations of hyperlocal news, blogs and data, mashed up with maps, which just scream "local."

It's been more than a year now since Backfence failed, but smart people are still exploring the hyperlocal sphere, and while Backfence's problems were unique, our basic concept remains sound. Somebody is going to figure out how to make it work and make a business out of it, and when that happens, newspapers and local broadcasters lose their last unique offering. If you don't have an aggressive hyperlocal strategy, you're not going to be around in five years.

So where are the hyperlocal strategies? With the possible exception of WashingtonPost.com's terrific Local Explorer product, no traditional news organization is even close to being as advanced as the various upstart efforts in leveraging technology to reach down to the neighborhood level. And there still are only a handful of user-generated hyperlocal experiments by newspapers—notably Denver's YourHub and the Chicago Tribune's TribLocal.

With budgets being slashed, this isn't a good time to find money at traditional publishers for experiments like these. But they're vital to hope for long-term survival. Google and the others are coming for a piece of the $100 billion local advertising pie, and newspapers and local broadcasters need to start competing in this space, pronto.

Comments

[Oscar Martinez]

Amen, Mark.

[Timothy]

Sounds like you're advocating that some of the larger newspaper chains buy the "upstarts" you mentioned. This would probably be a good first step in helping traditional media solve the local puzzle. Plus it would inject some needed tech-start-up DNA into these old behemoths. :-)

[Beth Lawton]

Mark,

Wondering if you saw (and what you thought of) the Winter 2007 Nieman Reports on newspapers and whether "local" is the answer... http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/contents.html.

[Mark Potts]

Beth:
The Nieman Reports package was comprehensive and very interesting. I was one of the authors, in fact!