As I’ve mentioned previously, I have a love-hate relationship with The New York Times — love the writing, hate the elitist aftertaste.
Thus it was with both sadness and schadenfreude that I learned Wednesday of the demise of its hyperlocal project “The Local” in northern New Jersey. Just like that, The Times pulled the plug on The Local’s coverage of Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange and dumped its archive on hyperlocal pioneer BaristaNet, Business Insider reported.
Why did The Times’ “experiment” fail in New Jersey when it’s met some success in Brooklyn and is expanding into Manhattan’s East Village? What happened?
The way I see it, the New Jersey Local was hit with a one-two punch as it swaggered out of its corner. First, the news site saw editorial turnover in December, twelve months into what would eventually be a 15-month run. It can’t be easy for any news enterprise to recover from that kind of blow so early in its operations.
More troublesome (to me, anyway) was its business plan. The website’s goal was to rely on volunteer writers and unpaid student interns for its content. The Times already leans on students from CUNY’s J-school and New York University to fuel its Local sites in New York, yet it couldn’t ink a deal with Seton Hall University, which sits smack in the middle of what was the New Jersey Local’s South Orange beat.
In the end, “it couldn’t find the right partnership,” Times associate managing editor Jim Schachter told Business Insider. On top of that, the Jersey website didn’t have the resources to hire a full-time reporter, Schachter added.
Of course it didn’t have the resources to pay a reporter. The Local had no intentions of paying its other contributors or student interns, and an unpaid labor force means no overhead and no need to create sustainable revenue streams. It never anticipated the need to hire someone when the volunteer pool ran dry and the student interns never materialized.
One might also make the argument that The Times left too heavy an editorial imprint on the Jersey Local. The Old Gray Lady has an uptight, institutional voice that works on Park Avenue but not necessarily on South Orange Avenue. Conversely, BaristaNet’s tone is more engaging and, arguably, better suited to local and hyperlocal coverage.
But don’t blame the Jersey Local’s demise on competition from AOL’s Patch affiliate. According to Compete.com, the Jersey Local had 19,635 unique visitors in May, compared with 7,745 for Patch’s South Orange site.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Zooomabooma.
To be fair to the NYT, they called it an experiment from the start. I give them credit for being open and honest about how hard it is to make a hyperlocal site work and even more credit for handing off the traffic to Baristanet. Not a lot of companies out there being as transparent about their intentions and sharing what works and what doesn’t. I think that’s good for the hyperlocal community (and yes, ultimately Outside.in’s biz).
Thanks for your comment, Mark.
I’ll give The Times credit for giving this model a try. Certainly, it had big obstacles to tackle — the departure of Jersey Local’s managing editor, and the publication’s inability to make “the right partnership,” as one of its editors told Business Insider.
I should say that this model’s failure may just be a matter of the area’s microeconomic environment. The New York Locals benefit from a massive pool of university students. (The CUNY system alone has 200,000 students, including those attending its J-school and writing programs at Baruch and Brooklyn colleges.) On the flip side, the Jersey Local’s beat had only Seton Hall University. Montclair State and Rutgers-Newark universities aren’t too far away, but it may not have been a practical commute for unpaid student interns.
Back to the drawing board.