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 15, 2011

So Arianna Huffington is taking over the internet. Now what?

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: I have a love/hate relationship with The New York Times. Its aloof, elitist tone dings my psyche like a supermarket shopping cart and renders my self-esteem a pockmarked jalopy. That’s the hate part, by the way.

Now here’s the love part. Last week, The Times published two articles that should give independent hyperlocalists new hope in competing with the local Patch outlet, soon to be governed by the Google-savvy Arianna Huffington.

Both articles discuss search engine optimization (SEO), the internet voodoo that boosts a website’s prominence in search results. It’s the bread and butter of The Huffington Post, why AOL coughed up $315 million — most of it cash money — to buy the current-events blog, and why Huffington is getting paid $4 million annually to run Patch and AOL’s other content-generating properties.

SEO is often associated with what I call the bieberfication of journalism: the monetization of current events, though not necessarily of news. For example, The Huffington Post monitors the web for popular search-engine queries — tween heartthrob Justin Bieber is hot shit these days — and then generates content around that subject. A tell-tale headline, copy chock full of key words, and a fine-tuned URL bump The Post’s article to the top of search results, thus increasing its page views and advertising revenue.

Patch sites are likely to follow Huffington’s modus operandi, loading their sites with juicy content for the search engine spiders. That means articles with “accident,” “shooting,” “fire” and other sensational topics as key words. After all, how many hits can “local zoning laws” squeeze out of a Google search?

But just as Patch can score high with those words, so can independent hyperlocalists. Loading key words into an article’s headline, lede and URL (if possible) can improve its standing against Patch in search engine results. After that, it’s up to the hyperlocalist’s writing, reporting skills and rapport with the audience to cash in on that search result and convert the incidental visitor into a regular reader.

Another SEO trick — this one pulled by retailer JC Penney — is to link and be linked to other websites, even unrelated or abandoned sites, The Times reported. More than 2,000 websites linked to the JC Penney home page, thus boosting its standing in search results for dresses, bedding, area rugs and other assorted stuff. Google considers this practice verboten and can knock a website off its spiders’ radar as punishment, but it’s still done. (Reps for the JC Penney Co. deny any chicanery.)

Hyperlocalists can work this angle by linking to area blogs and regional news sites, and hope that these sites will reciprocate. They can also leave comments on other sites and include a link back to their own. Ideally, these comments will add to the online conversation and not just serve as obvious (and obnoxious) self-promotion. A thoughtful and intelligent comment can attract more readers to a hyperlocalist’s site, whether or not the link optimizes search-engine standing.

While SEO draws readers to a website, quality content ultimately keeps readers (and advertisers) coming back for more. And it’s that quality that keeps an anxious Arianna Huffington awake at night.

Photo of Arianna Huffington courtesy of The New York Times.

Sep 14, 2010

Cooking with oil

There’s an old saying in New York that describes work progressing at good speed: “It’s cooking with oil.” The phrase makes a lot of sense when one considers the tasty goodness that can spring from a bubbling deep fryer, just as long as that molten fat doesn’t bubble over.

Well, I’m proud (and terrified) to announce that my new hyperlocal project is “cooking with oil.” The beta site is running, the Twitter feed is tweeting, and a Tumblr blog is tracking its progress. Cosmetic improvements are in the works, as is a mobile-friendly site. With luck, the full Monty will launch next spring.

But there are a number of questions on the business end that need answers, or at least clues. How does one conduct market research on the hyperlocal level? And who or what constitutes the true market? How far does personality go in promoting or harming a publication’s success?

I’ve had Twitter discussions (twiscussions?) with fellow hyperlocalists on some of these matters, and I’ll share their thoughts and my own in the next few posts.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user SETmariposa.

Sep 2, 2010

Color, coverage and confirmation

Just the other day, I told a friend via Twitter not to believe what “they” say, that one really can go home again. By that I meant a return to my native New York City after four years of working the hyperlocal scene in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. I never expected a guy named Lee and his gun-toting, bomb-planting, hostage-taking antics at Discovery Communications would send me back to Silver Spring, if only digitally.

Wednesday afternoon was one long tweet: conversations with friends and former neighbors who work in and around the Discovery building, and retweets of news updates from boots on the ground. Emails and Facebook messages came from larger news organizations, asking for any information I may have had on the suspect or Discovery’s past dealings with him. And I bitched a lot about theories and comments from unnamed sources being passed off as fact (more on that below).

Hindsight being twenty-twenty, and this being the digital age, accolades and criticism of the event’s news coverage surfaced immediately or in real time. Regional news startup TBD.com got well-deserved props for its streaming video and online coverage, with help from its television affiliate WJLA. (Both organizations live under the Allbritton corporate umbrella.) But some of the news coverage (not necessarily that of TBD or WJLA) got gruff from the Asian-American Journalists Association (AAJA), Slate magazine and me:

Was the suspect’s ethnicity relevant? As Wednesday’s events unfolded, the AAJA offered this advice via Twitter: Ethnicity should be reported only when relevant and when that relevance can be explained to the news consumer’s satisfaction. The organization later explained on its website that it objected to “Asian” being the only modifier used to describe the suspected gunman. “It’s doubtful that news organizations would say ‘Black man (or white man) takes hostages.’ This reminder is in that same vein,” the website stated.

I agree, though personally I didn’t see any headlines or tweets describing him only as an Asian gunman. But there was relevance on the hyperlocal level to identifying the suspect as Asian. A lot of Silver Spring residents knew Lee as the village idiot (arguably one of many) who two years ago staged a one-man protest against Discovery Communications and then paid homeless men and women to join his picket line. That same week, he started a near-stampede along the neighborhood’s main shopping strip as he tossed cash in the air to evade his paid-to-picket employees.

Describing the suspect as Asian was germane to the story and a big wink-wink, nudge-nudge to Silver Spring residents. Neighbors knew exactly who took hostages that day — there aren’t too many Asian men with an anti-Discovery agenda running around town — without anyone even saying the dude’s name, and without confirmation from the police (more on that below). Read the rest of this entry »

Sep 1, 2010

The is and ain’t of hyperlocal news (and pizza)

Some thought has been bounced around the internets these past two weeks on what it means to be hyperlocal.

Sarah Hartley, editor of Guardian Local in the United Kingdom, last week characterized hyperlocal news in ten bullet points. Some of them were on the mark: participation from the author and the community, a willingness to link to outside sources, a spirit of independent coverage, and (sadly) a general state of shit brokeness. Hartley also threw in the characteristic of “opinion blended with fact,” though I’ll argue the act of weighing another’s objectivity is a subjective exercise.

Hartley’s blog post is worth the read, though I’m tired of trying to define the nature of hyperlocal news. It is what it is, and it ain’t what it ain’t.

However, I’m in a twist over what Barb Palser, director of digital media with McGraw-Hill Broadcasting, called the hazards of hyperlocal. In the June/July issue of American Journalism Review, Palser described hyperlocal news as “difficult, expensive and not for the faint of heart.” The perceived low demand for hyperlocal news, plus market saturation by way of existing news outlets, startup websites, blogs and social-networking sites, makes it nothing more than a financially unsustainable labor of love, she wrote.

Is hyperlocal news difficult and not for the faint of heart? Yes. No one said it would be easy. Is it expensive? When one considers the cost of labor — I’m talking about the true cost, including all those hours that hyperlocalists put in for free — then yes, it can get expensive.

But those descriptors apply to any new business or industry. Replace “hyperlocal news” with “pizzeria” and the same holds true. Pizza’s a tough gig and can get expensive. The perceived low demand for fat-laden cheese on top of high-sodium sauce and carbohydrate-rich crust, plus market saturation by way of pizzerias and other fast food eateries on every city block, amounts to a financially unsustainable blah blah blah.

It’s not about the quantity and quick availability of that pizza — er, hyperlocal news. It’s about quality. Urban dwellers (and probably some suburbanites) have myriad options when it comes to where they spend their time and money. Still, they gravitate towards the service or product they feel is best, even if more convenient or cheaper options exist. It’s what I’ve previously called the “emotional value” that a business lends to its community, and with careful business planning that fits the local microeconomy, I believe it can be profitable.

Is being the best at one’s business difficult and not for the faint of heart? Hellz yeah. Can it get expensive? Perhaps. But there’s always demand for a better product — pizza, hyperlocal news, whatever. It’s up to entrepreneurs to supply that better product.

Photos courtesy of Flickr user Adam Kuban.

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