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 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.

Link love:

Ballhype – Social Media Sports Done Right