The Hyper-Local Neighborhood is Getting More Crowded
Important Details: In some areas, real estate markets have slowed appreciably, with sellers outnumbering buyers and credit getting squeezed. But for online editions of newspapers, there’s a hyper-local gold rush going on. In just the past couple of weeks, at least three news companies have announced new local online initiatives. They – and many that have preceded them and will follow – combine the sense that local is the business priority for the news press, and that user-generated contributions are a key factor in that new local hyper-focus:
- Trinity Mirror strengthened its hyper-local presence in northeast U.K. It’s now launched 23 hyper-local sites (“Gazette Communities”) in the Tees Valley, related to its Evening Gazette paper. Each of the sites serves a single post code. The content is a mix of local news, events and blogs, with navigation covering such key neighborhood concerns as health, churches, clubs and societies, transport, and “property price check.”
- TownNews.com, which powers 1,500 smaller newspaper websites across the U.S., is moving into user-generated hyper-local in a big way. It’s contracted with The Port Network, using that company’s suite of user-gen story and photo posting/commenting/blogging/forum tools. Lee Enterprises owns a majority of TownNews, which is increasingly becoming a networked shared platform for smaller community papers.
- Finally, the Chicago Tribune announced a print extension of its own hyper-local online efforts. In April, it had launched new hyper-local sites at Triblocal.com, serving the west and southwest suburbs. Now the Tribune is beginning to harvest the story and photo content from those sites, much of which is created by citizen readers. The “reverse publishing” means the Tribune is creating two new print weekly sections. It’s a kind of “best-of” print section, with local advertisers a key target. The model is one that piggybacks on the YourHub experiment, started in Denver in May, 2005 Denver by MediaNews and Scripps. (See 26 October 2006 report “News Publishers Move to Capture Community-Created Content for Growth“). The idea: create both online and print hyperlocal products, produced largely by the community, and monetize both with spending by the local dry cleaner or restaurant, which normally would be priced out of buying ads for the metro edition overall. The Tribune launches compete with similar products offered by its arch-rival, the Sun-Times, which launched 30 hyper-local sites in June.
Implications: What began as an experiment is now turning into a contagion. The regional press has local fever, understanding that national coverage – increasingly commoditized and served up by many competitors – is not what their customers want. The launches noted here are just the latest batches as publishers test out what hyper-local attention really means. Peruse hyper-local sites, and you’ll see great disparity. On some sites, it’s a lively gathering, with lots of news and views shared. On others, the neighborhoods are lonely places, with a few posts here and there, but little sense of community engagement. In some, you see a real sense of community commerce – the merchant down the street – and in others, practically none.
Outsell believes that the first phase of hyper-local is now ending. It’s no longer an experiment, and one that publishers can take pride in by simply launching. The second phase is the important one: making a real business of hyper-local publishing, getting reader, staff, and advertiser engagement to give readers a reason to make the pages a necessary daily stop. So it’s all execution, and all about gaining critical mass. Publishers need to seed these communities with stories and introduce lively topics for discussion. Then they need to feed the sprouts, making sure that the sense of engagement – measured in time onsite, in community posts, comments, and photo uploads and in useful, timely advertising – is really growing. That’s how a business will be made.
Ultimately, the increasingly crowded hyper-local neighborhoods will thin as readers find the one most comfortable to them, and that’s where they’ll spend their time and money.