Place Sites Are the Place to Be
Important Details: Wondering who’s started a city or neighborhood site in your area? The new PlaceBlogger, launched this week, now makes it easy to get a quick look at who’s doing what, country-by-country, state-by-state and city-by-city. The site lays out a broad mandate about the notion of place, and how it’s written about:
Click on the PlaceBlogger location list and you can check on blogs by geography. Drill into California (121 place blogs) and you can find San Jose Inside. Spearheaded by a former mayor and having no relationship to the Mercury News daily, it’s a vibrant, often-updated, politically oriented site. If you are keen to learn about Iowa politics, ahead of the 2008 caucuses, there’s Political Forecast, based in Des Moines. Get a taste of New Orleans with The N.O. La. Forum. Some of the sites listed are happening places, others have low levels of activity. Check out the 35 sites in and around Portsmouth, U.K. to get a sense for the breadth of sites.
The PlaceBlogger site’s home page offers some pointers to the most vibrant sites as well, though the new site is a bit spare (and a bit buggy) beyond that home page and its directory at this point. The site has been put together by Lisa Williams, founder of Watertown, MA placeblog H2otown., and supported by PressThink. PressThink’s founder NYU Journalism Professor describes the value of PlaceBlogger here. Media observer Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media also supported the effort.
One of the citizen media sites that has often made Top 10 lists moved into newspaper ownership hands in mid-December, when McClatchy Newspapers bought Fresno Famous (and its sister Modesto Famous site), to further its reach in markets where it has dominant dailies. McClatchy had started its own community input site in Fresno, but decided that buying the fledgling leader was a good move.
Place is also a focus, in non-citizen media fashion for now, of the newly launched DayLife.com. DayLife is another of the news aggregation start-ups. In offering readers new kinds of ways to find the news they want, it’s made "place" a way to locate relevant news along with "people" and "organizations."
Finally, one of the early pioneers in "citizen media" is scaling back. Revealed Monday, BackFence, which originated sites in the District of Columbia suburbs, in Evanston, and took one over in the San Francisco Bay Area, is retrenching. BackFence CEO Susan deFife has resigned and 12 of its18 staffers have been laid off.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Place, as a Web term, is a proxy for the "local" that local publishers, TV and radio station operators like to claim and talk about as their core strengths. Outsell believes that Lisa Williams’ place manifesto,above, bears learning from. Local is in fact about experiencing life in a particular place and it includes news reporting, but oh-so-much more. It is that elusive connection between local news and local experience that will make or break local sites. McClatchy deserves kudos for recognizing how non-newspaper people did "place" better and buying into their vision. News publishers, going forward, still have time to get "local" or "place" right. It’s a field that everyone from the GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) companies to the Backfences are trying to get into because of that other not-so-elusive connection between local reading and local commerce. Getting it right means using the rather large megaphone that papers (and broadcasters) have, leveraging both their content and their reach.
In Outsell’s recent report, "News Publishers Move to Capture Community-Created Content," (Oct. 27, 2006), we offered numerous starting points for navigating — and then harnessing — the new user-generated culture. PlaceBlogger offers another tutorial, all nicely assembled in one spot for publishers to take a look-see at how this world is developing, down the block and around the globe.