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.

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.

Feb 8, 2011

Things done and not done

A wise man (Larry the Cable Guy, actually) once said, “Git ‘r done.” Well, I’m proud to announce: it’s done. I gave birth to a healthy baby in October, and now that the kid is mostly sleeping through the night, I can get back to debunking the business of hyperlocal news.

One thing that didn’t get past my sleep-deprived eyes during my maternity leave was news that TBD.com was ending advertising sales for its affiliates. Launched last summer, TBD reports local news in and around Washington, DC, and serves as a portal to more than 200 hyperlocal news sites and blogs. The idea behind its affiliate network was to build sales strength in numbers: TBD would act as an ad server, and participating websites would get a cut of the advertising revenue.

Everyone and their brother watched closely to see whether this model would finally turn a buck on online local and hyperlocal news. But by the end of November, TBD announced it was pulling the plug on this program. “Unfortunately, the advertising aspect of the network has not taken off as effectively as the traffic and linking relationship,” Steve Buttry, TBD’s director of community engagement, wrote.

I’m not privy to exactly what went wrong, but here are some things an ad network might do to get things right:

Start small. According to TBD, one quarter — about 50 — of its affiliates participated in the ad network. But that number might have diluted its value. It’s the danger of doing a volume business: If demand can’t move all that ad-space inventory, then the ad server and its affiliates are shit out of luck.

Instead, a network of ten or fewer websites might offer advertisers a more targeted audience and, therefore, a more valuable piece of advertising real estate. The network might not sell as many ads, but it won’t have to if it can charge a premium for its space.

Love thy neighbor. Offering advertisers a targeted audience means limiting network affiliates to a specific geographic area, maybe a single county or city. In a large market like New York, a successful network might represent just two or three adjacent neighborhoods.

A network that stretches across several counties or states (as TBD’s network does) can actually lock out advertisers who draw on sizable yet geographically focused markets. The chain-restaurant operator knows whether her food is worth a 30-minute car ride across state lines, or just a stumble across the street. She won’t spend money to advertise with a large network if her only interest is in a local or hyperlocal market.

Work it like Goldilocks. Sure, everyone wants loving from big advertisers and their big ad budgets, and no one wants to hustle for ad revenue from mom-and-pop shops. But an ad network might succeed in courting regional sponsors who have modest ad budgets and value the opportunity to speak and sell directly to core markets. It’s an approach that’s not too big, not too small, but just right.

I don’t know how much (if any) of this advice addresses TBD’s specific woes, but I do hope they find the right fit for their business structure. Git ‘r done.

Illustration of Larry the Cable Guy courtesy of Joe Bluhm.

Sep 21, 2010

Who’s pimping who?

An unattributed quote floated around the Twitterverse two weeks ago that went something like this: Those who don’t pay to read the news are not consumers. They’re the product being sold.

ZING! It hurt like hell, but it was the truth. When news audiences receive free content, they no longer count as customers. They’re not dropping coin to keep the lights on or the servers running. They don’t pay for writers’ salaries. And even if they contribute “emotional” value to a news outlet through reader comments, that value doesn’t do jack for a business if it doesn’t translate into dollars and cents.

In my previous attempt at hyperlocal news, I placed the audience’s satisfaction ahead of business development. It was a colossal mistake. Readers loved my frank restaurant reviews as much as restaurant owners hated them, and that meant an enormous loss of potential advertising revenue from the neighborhood’s largest industry.

This time, I hope to develop my audience and customer base simultaneously without jeopardizing the quality of my publication’s content. Here’s how:

Extend services unrelated to my publication to residents and the business community. One of the revenue streams I plan to pursue is group-discount brokering (the Groupon model). To make it work, I need a mailing list of prospective shoppers (an audience) and business customers willing to offer these shoppers a discount. To build this mailing list, I plan to attend local meet-ups to learn what residents want or need from their community, and to gently introduce the idea of group discounts. Call it market research.

That information becomes leverage when approaching business customers for group discounts. It also brings together an otherwise non-paying audience with paying customers, without selling out a news outlet’s integrity.

Build my publication’s audience slooooooowly. Since setting up a beta site earlier this month, I’ve posted only two stories. But I’ve used Twitter to publicize my organization as a news source, mostly by retweeting neighborhood-specific stories from larger news outlets and by posting photos. So far, I have 13 followers, and that’s fine with me.

This modest following allows me to test different things, from writing style and voice, to website design. The publication’s slow, deliberate development also gives me the opportunity to educate customers (in this case, advertisers) on how my business operates, not as a quick hustle but as the next evolutionary step in advertising.

Those are my first two steps in building the business, though I should keep a few spare ideas in my pocket should neither of these approaches work.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user chillhiro.

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