Social Media Now: Think Locally, Surf Regionally
April 2, 2007 by Jason Chervokas
Maybe it’s because I started my career in the community newspaper business, but for whatever reason I love local news. When I travel I make a point of seeking out small papers in tiny communities across the world and voraciously devour all the details of local land use battles, trash schedules and school sports. Working in community journalism also was fabulous preparation for Internet journalism. Unlike journalists at major metro institutions like The New York Times (for whom I also worked), community journalists work in a world where sources, advertisers and readers come from the same small universe and where readers regularly walk into the office to shout in your face.
But for some reason the 10 year old effort to drag community journalism onto the Net has largely failed and not for a lack of effort by companies both big and small. (The first effort to harness citizen journalism that I recall was a 1992 print effort by Jedd Gould in Connecticut that lasted a decade before going the of many community newspapers.)
The era of citizen journalism has inspired a new round of local online news efforts–including the recently launched outside.in, founded by my old Silicon Alley colleague Steven Johnson. The latest effort comes from Topix. The company, which is majority owned by three major newspaper companies and which previously organized search results according to local parameters, announced over the weekend the launch of Topix.com–a revamp of its local news business built around community-edited blogs.
Topix CEO Rich Skrenta has a great blog post explaining the process by which Topix came to the decision to revamp. The post should serve as a model for corporate communications and transparency and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the Internet publishing business. The most interesting part of Skrenta’s discussion revolves around creating an instantly identifiable visual metaphor for the new site, allowing users to enter without effort. Mission accomplished. The Topix.com local pages look great and the blog-style layout is effortless to enter. But there’s little yet in the way of community contributed news (almost all the news on my local site came from a nearby Gannet paper–Gannet is an investor in Topix).
A lot of links to the story this morning–from Techcrunch to paidContent to Mashable–but nothing really in the way of analysis although Frank Gruber has a nice description of the new feature set. Even if it were just a matter of reorganizing its offerings to make them more accessible the Topix revamp would be a good one, but will it be enough to awaken local news online? Is local news the sleeping giant of the Internet in the era of citizen journalism?
Maybe. Certainly local information is as at home on the Net as any other kind of information. Already a generation of people use the Internet to look up movie times, peruse local restaurant menus, check the dates of recycling pick ups, and buy and sell used stuff. These things once formed the lifeblood of newspapers and their online migration goes a long way towards explaining the continuing economic demise of that business.
And in large cities like New York there are enough people in any given neighborhood for one or two people to emerge who are engaged enough to contribute and participate in local issues online. But as the focus of a local site narrows, finding those individuals becomes increasingly difficult, and of course the audience of interested parties becomes smaller. In addition, the smaller the community the more likely it is that those who care about, say, school board meetings or village trustee meetings are the people who actually attend those meetings in the first place (I wonder how the ratings for public access airings of town board meetings compare with the attendance that those meetings). Certainly major issues can stimulate community involvement online, but you can’t build a predictable business on the hope of a steady stream of major issues effecting small communities.
If I were in the local online business today I would be less concerned with citizen journalism and more concerned with socially enabled regional directories, but that’s just me.
BTW….it’s off topic but kudos to EMI for offering DRM-free music compressed at higher sampling rates. Now if the industry would just embrace flac we’d really be on to something.
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[...] gaylife.guide@about.com wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptMaybe it’s because I started my career in the community newspaper business, but for whatever reason I love local news. When I travel I make a point of seeking out small papers in tiny communities across the world and voraciously devour … [...]
posted today ‘Citizen Journalism on the rise’ at http://www.sophisticaworld.com/exploreCO.aspx?coid=CO4207133235
Here is the snip:
Topix.com homes in on citizen journalists
Citizen journalism is in the rise, but I see a big problem. It is helping the media to create 15 second minutes of fame for all of us out there who want it, and while they do this for you, they are selling advertising around you.
At least Sophistica is free of advertising. If advertisiers support our work it will come in the form of Adaptive recommendations that can also take the form of ‘useful’ advertising. By ‘useful advertising’ I mean ‘Vendor driven’ white papers, special offers, tools and guides, can be incorporated into a user’s experience at the right time, providing ‘benefit’ to the user instead of intrusive and annoying advertising.
So, I do not think that any traditional media can touch our potential for ‘Radical Authenticity’ because we are already supported by ManyWorlds Inc., due to their kindness and willingness to support ‘our initiative.’
Look forward to your comments on this.
And if you are an advertiser then you have a new way to reach us in a benificial and positive way. So give anyone of of the people on our ‘About Page’ a call to discuss with them how to create your own profile and tell us about your wonderful products.
[...] In some cases, editors will be drawn from the pool of active contributors, in the same way that Wikipedia.org does — but in some cases, stories or tips or opinions will be handled by an editor from one of Topix’s member papers. It will be interesting to see how Topix fares with a model that is also being pursued by Newsvine and (to a lesser extent) Daylife. Greg Sterling has some thoughts on the relaunch at Search Engine Land, and so does Jason Chervokas at the Social Media Club. [...]
[...] If I were in the local online business today I would be less concerned with citizen journalism and more concerned with socially enabled regional directories, but that’s just me. —> http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2007/04/02/social-media-now-think-locally-surf-regionally/ ~ [...]
[...] Social Media Club - » Social Media Now: Think Locally, Surf Regionally Maybe it’s because I started my career in the community newspaper business, but for whatever reason I love local news. When I travel I make a point of seeking out small papers in tiny communities across the world and voraciously devour all the details o (tags: topix.com socialnetworking social socialsoftware redesign redevelopment relaunch Chervokas) These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
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