Local news, communication and monetization

Today's Post has a story about the teething problems of hyper-local web-based information services, "For Local News Site, Model Just Didn't Click."

The problem as I see it is the atomization of market segments. Every media economics textbook starts out with the sentence "the business of media is to provide audiences to advertisers." The smaller the market segment in terms of audience: (1) the more expensive it is to produce content; and (2) the harder it is to sell advertising.

Now wrt (1), you could argue, well, it's not expensive to produce content if people do it for free (= bloggers, participants in community forums, etc.). But it's still expensive in terms of time. Many people are willing to do this for other reasons such as having a forum, and/or for other benefits (including developing consulting opportunities), etc.

A flip side with local forums, or narrow-casted content is the difficulty of getting discussion off the ground and maintaining discussion once it starts. Neighborhood e-lists need a number of participants, as well as quality participants to maintain discussion. And the world is full of blogs that are updated only intermittently.

Anyway, I noticed that a beta-web service Outside In, has added this particular blog to their feed, so I poked around the site a little.

I find the site's principles to be interesting.

1. The natives know best.
2. The post's location is more important than the blogger's location.
3. Neighborhoods are more important than maps.
4. Geo-tags are only the beginning.
5. Local news often has a long-shelf life.

The website founder writes:

We set out to create this experience for one overarching reason: to date, online neighborhood information has been a divided space. On the one hand, there is a great surplus of data out there: the hyperlocal bloggers, review sites like Yelp and Judysbook, city government sites, and traditional media. The problem is: there's no single place that unites all those different voices, that grounds them all in specific locations. With help from you -- suggesting and tagging neighborhood data, and suggesting ways that we can better organize the web geographically -- we think outside.in can help unify the divided space of hyperlocal content. And in doing so, hopefully we can make our neighborhoods even more interesting places than they already are.

What do you think?

Index Keywords: civic-engagement