Oct 3, 2011

Graduation Day

The experiment began almost two years ago. I was shit broke, knocked up and bored after my hyperlocal publication folded for lack of revenue. To keep myself on top of industry developments, I started this blog. It was part post mortem, part pipe dream for a future enterprise.

Graduation

I thought a lot and blogged a lot. I traveled to Denver, where I got to talk a lot. I gave birth to my kid nearly a year ago, and when the fog of labor and delivery lifted, I returned to thinking and blogging and talking. But one vital thing was missing: I wasn’t doing a lot. Classes were taken, presentations were attended, but I wasn’t applying what I’d learned. I was book smart, street stupid.

But that’s about to change. Right fucking now.

From this point forward, The Hyperlocalist blog won’t be a retrospective analysis or an experiment conducted in a vacuum. Instead, it will follow the development of my new hyperlocal venture — The Jackson Heights (NY) Herald. This will be an online business plan, a test of whether my ideas and those learned along the way will work in the real world.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

Jun 13, 2011

Random acts of audience engagement

Free hugsLast month, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism hosted an awesome presentation on how new journalism outlets can generate revenue beyond traditional advertising. It was bootstrapping 101, a lesson in being scrappy and resourceful without looking cheap, and it re-energized my thoughts on how to fund my future hyperlocal project. And I can’t emphasize this enough: it was awesome.

Future blog posts will explore the presentation’s seven fists of revenue fury: expertise, events, membership, subscriptions, product sales, donations and advertising re-imagined. Jeremy Caplan, director of the J-school’s center for entrepreneurial journalism and that evening’s presenter, carefully framed these revenue streams with startup businesses in mind, though even experienced hyperlocalists will find them worth a second look.

No discussion of revenue can start without an examination of audience engagement and its importance to the survival of any small business. I’ve yapped previously about a news outlet’s “emotional” value, how the interaction between reporter and reader through a website’s comments section can influence offline, real-life decisions. Advertisers appreciate that influence and recognize how it can work to their advantage. (They can also fear and loathe that influence — Yelp, anyone?) Unfortunately, emotional value as I’ve described it can’t be easily quantified.

Enter Facebook, Twitter and every other form of social media available. One way or another, they all display the number of users who follow a news organization’s account, and engagement is evident through wall posts and retweets. Emotional value finally has a number that advertisers can understand. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg!

The best part: it doesn’t matter if a news organization’s social-media activity detracts from its website’s page views, declared Miral Sattar, founder of the niche site Weddings.Divanee.com. The organization’s influence will continue to have value as long as it engages its audience, whether on its own site or elsewhere, she said during the CUNY J-school presentation.

For example, Sattar’s wedding-oriented site recently asked its audience to choose the best-looking engagement ring from a series of photos posted on its Facebook page, with votes recorded as “likes” for individual images. The activity did nothing to drive participants to the main website (ie, it did not increase the number of page views), yet it demonstrated to potential advertisers the website’s engagement and influence with its audience.

A note on social-networking numbers: bigger isn’t always better. If an organization has to follow 20,000 Twitter users just to get 15,000 to reciprocate, then that’s not value. That’s volume, the same game played by Patch and other large-scale hyperlocal operations. And it’s a game that small, independent hyperlocal sites won’t win.

Even emailed newsletters demonstrate engagement and influence to potential advertisers, Sattar and Caplan described. A long list of subscribers shows readers’ interest in the news outlet (or at least a reluctance to mark the newsletter as spam).

Furthermore, email is still considered a more personal, private form of communication, the speakers suggested. To advertisers, it means an organization has more than its foot in the reader’s door — it’s sitting in that reader’s living room, playing with the family dog, eating chips on the sofa and watching “Glee.” That influence and intimacy counts more to neighborhood advertisers than page views and search-engine optimization.

Jun 1, 2011

It’s a family affair.

Mom shut up!

Here’s a confession: I don’t (and can’t) thank my mother enough. During her brief visit last weekend, she spoon fed my seven-month-old while I indulged in a carefree meal. She carried the kid and kept her entertained while I surfed the net. She lulled the baby to sleep so that I can watch the Mets lose yet another game to the Phillies.

My mom said she didn’t mind the work, that it was all part of spoiling the kid. Surely I didn’t mind having time to vegetate on the couch, even if I didn’t agree with some of my mother’s practices. (Anthony Bourdain as children’s television?) Still I appreciated the opportunity to come up for much needed air.

The mental respite from parenthood allowed me to reflect on the value of family, friends and other forms of support. Obviously, love and friendship go a long way to making life good, but they also pay off in a business sense. My mother’s willingness to take on some of the childcare liberated my mind (if only briefly) to consider the details of my next hyperlocal venture. Thank you, Mom!

Other hyperlocal publications are family affairs through and through, with spouses running the newsroom and kids scanning the police radio. My husband volunteered his photography and videography skills to my previous attempt at hyperlocal news. While he did this only occasionally, it was his way of participating in what became a very personal, time-consuming project for me. (Here’s another confession: I don’t [and can't] thank my husband enough.)

But working with relatives and close friends, or relying on them to manage personal matters, can be tricky. Expectations can be unrealistically high, and criticism can come across as harsh. My husband stewed every time I refused to publish raw video that he spent hours compressing and compiling on the computer. And I banged my head against the wall whenever he skipped details like names, locations and dates.

The only way a hyperlocalist can survive that is to accept a loved one’s help with all its perceived imperfections, knowing that it’s offered with best intentions for the business and the personal relationship. My husband wanted to help, so I let him. Instead of recording continuous footage of a news event, I asked him to film short snippets that were more suitable to my web publication. Also, I asked him to take stock photos of buildings and street scenes, which didn’t rely heavily on dateline details and could be used anytime.

Adjusting my expectations allowed me to delegate clearly defined responsibilities to my husband, without worrying about the impact his work would have on my publication’s brand. In the end, his contributions built a photo bank chock full o’ images worthy of republication (and a modest revenue stream). And his videos were a popular item on my site’s YouTube page.

If he volunteers to shoot photos for my future publication, I’d welcome him into the newsroom. And if my mom wants to fatten up my kid while watching the Travel Channel, that’s okay too.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jon Haynes Photography. This post also appears on my personal blog Question the Wisdom.

Feb 24, 2011

Where hyperlocal news meets the “like” button

On Tuesday evening, I received a message via Facebook from Cynthia Cotte Griffiths, a friend and fellow hyperlocalist from Maryland. It was the kind of message that made me wince, smile and then slap my knee at her ingenuity.

First, the wince. Cotte Griffiths announced that she and her business partner, Brad Rourke, were pulling the plug on their Rockville (Md) Central news website. After three and a half years in publication, both had grown tired of juggling content creation and advertising sales, she told me. Furthermore, competition from Patch, another indie website, the local print publication and the municipal government’s site made their reporting redundant, Rourke blogged.

Then came the smile. Rockville Central would live on as a news source through its Facebook page, where their fans were already gabbing about current events. With a combination of news aggregation and original reporting, “we can create a true community hub,” Cotte Griffiths wrote.

And then the knee slap. Even though Cotte Griffiths and Rourke won’t generate advertising revenue from their Facebook page, they can establish themselves as social-media experts with tabs on the local vibe. That can translate into serious revenue from social-media consulting, building an online presence for small businesses, nonprofit groups and even government agencies.

Then another knee slap. Facebook is already a mobile-friendly service, whether one uses its mobile website or a native (platform-specific) app. That gives the Rockville Central fan page greater reach without having to “mobilize” its own website or develop an expensive app. The technical witchcraft has already been done for them.

And still another knee slap. Cotte Griffiths and Rourke can take their social-media savvy onto Twitter, where they can generate revenue from sponsored tweets. Also, they can use the multimedia-heavy publishing platform Tumblr to build a portfolio of marketable stock photos or to publish original audio or video content, though Tumblr’s community of users is still small relative to Facebook and Twitter.

By the time I reached the closing salutations of Cotte Griffiths’ message, my knee was swollen from the slapping and I was swearing up a storm. (“Fucking genius!” came up a lot.) Sure, they’d have to stay ahead of the social-media curve in case some future service turns Facebook into MySpace. In the meantime, they can provide hyperlocal information, foster dialog among neighbors, and make bank as consultants.

One day after our Facebook exchange, the news of Rockville Central’s transition had made its way through Twitter. And by Wednesday evening, members of the Online News Association were talking about it at a mixer inside the offices of The New York Times. Some were intrigued, others were disappointed that local news would take this route.

I’m hitting the “like” button on this one.

Illustration courtesy of Flickr user Christopher S. Penn.

Feb 16, 2011

Hello, 2012 presidential primary season. Will you be my friend?

Mmm, Iowa! Where the wind comes sweeping down the plain. The Buckeye State. Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. And the traditional starting gate for US presidential campaigns.

Every four years, journalists descend upon Iowa, stalking would-be leaders of the free world as they shake hands, kiss babies and eat their weight in pancakes. However, the upcoming 2012 campaign season promises to have a hyperlocal twist to it. Arianna Huffington, newly appointed overlord to AOL’s content-producing properties, plans to use Patch.com editors to cover the election on a “granular” level, she told The Washington Post.

Huffington’s plan is genius: employ an army of already-embeds who won’t need lodging or driving directions, and let them lay the foundation for AOL’s larger, search engine-savvy campaign coverage. “We will have thousands and thousands of people covering the election. Covering the Republicans. Covering the Democrats. Just being transparent about it,” she said.

And that’s when my heart sank. Reporting on elections can be a major drain on hyperlocal news outlets, especially those with limited human resources. So how the hell are independent hyperlocalists supposed to compete with myriad minions of The Huffington Patch?

First, they can beat Patch to the punch. Indie hyperlocalists in states with high-profile primaries (Iowa and New Hampshire, for example), as well as those in the convention cities of Charlotte and Tampa, should immediately contact larger news outlets and promote themselves as location experts. If AOL can use its hypothetical Des Moines Patch editor (more likely, someone from its Seed content farm) to blanket the Iowa caucuses, surely The New York Times and CNN can pay Cedar Rapids‘ independent hyperlocalist to work the beat.

(Incidentally, hyperlocalists from Super-Duper Tuesday states are not shit out of luck when it comes to milking the campaign coverage. They can similarly promote themselves to NPR or some other large outlet as experts in their beat’s hot topic — unemployment, gay marriage, the effect of prolonged deployment on military families, whatever.)

Notice my use of the word “pay.” The time and energy required to cover a campaign deserve appropriate compensation from whomever is doing the hiring. National exposure will not fuel a hyperlocal news outlet while its resources are diverted to the campaign trail.

To earn that living wage, independent hyperlocalists must offer coverage that encompasses more than just the who, what and where. The material must deliver a distinct local flavor and offer unique insight into how political events and the populace interact. This connection with place, and the ability to drop a reader smack in the middle of it, will distinguish the independent hyperlocalist from a Patch editor or embedded big-media reporter.

Ultimately, if a hyperlocal news site can’t beat Patch’s campaign coverage, it should join it — sort of. Local Patch sites likely will create RSS (syndication) feeds for their campaign stories, which can then stream onto a hyperlocal news site’s sidebar. Thus, the independent hyperlocal site offers its readers a portal to political coverage without having to create content.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Carl Wycoff.

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