We are all citizens of the world. We are or should be interested in and concerned about international events and affairs. However, what really concerns us are the potholes on our own street. All news, like all politics, on some level is local.
On the theory that there is a business model to support geographic-specific information, more and more media outlets are going local, even hyper-local.
This week AOL formally announced its plans for Patch, the web company it bought last summer for $7 million. Patch concentrates on small communities, 15,000 to 75,000 residents, with websites featuring news, local events and classifieds. AOL will spend $50 million to launch 500 such sites by the end of this year, an extremely ambitious goal.
There is also EveryBlock http://www.everyblock.com/ which targets 16 much larger cities, 4 of them in beta, with block-by-block information. A search of my zip code turned up 3 real estate listings, 12 photos, 15 business reviews and 1 business license, 10 crimes and some content aggregated from other sites. Not exactly front page stuff but nice to know that all the crimes were minor and none involved a residence.
Spot.us takes a more reportorial approach and is currently testing in the Bay Area of California. The site raises money to report and write about larger local issues using a non-profit model.
Three different approaches and three different business models. Patch, with the power of the reinvigorated AOL behind it, is banking on local classifieds. EveryBlock creates some content but picks up freely available notices and sorts it all by zip code. Outside.in, another hyper-local media company covering almost 60,000 communities, publishes no original content. Every Block and Spot.us both have received grants from the Knight Foundation, which funds local journalism.
There are, of course, as many questions and naysayers as there are enthusiastic cheerleaders for these experiments.
Newsonomics asked 9 questions about Patch that could be applied to almost any of these. These start with how the math works on staffing—a whopping 500 editors for Patch, 1 in each office, will make no dent in the unemployment figures for trained journalists. But they keep coming back to money.
There is money to be made in local advertising to be sure. Borrell Associates projects that the local advertising market in 2011 will total $16 billion. But there are a lot of big companies with substantial ad sales teams and track records chasing it along with the start-ups like Patch, not to mention the Yellow Pages and legions of bloggers.
Meanwhile, if companies like the Tribune could get their acts together, they could go after the hyperlocal market as well. I have to ask why in the almost 20 years I’ve lived in Chicago, I don’t subscribe to either of the daily papers but read the local coverage in the New York Times (another local news business model), will watch live video on the local NBC affiliate and give money to the local NPR station. Like most readers, I want my news local—at least some of it—but I also want it to be good.
The struggle with all these experiments is figuring out how to be local without being parochial. Oh, and profitable, that too.
There it is: “Like most readers, I want my news local—at least some of it—but I also want it to be good.