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.

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.

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.

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).

Was there too much coverage of an all-too-frequent event? On Wednesday evening, Slate’s Jack Shafer complained that wall-to-wall coverage of a hostage situation did nothing to improve the state of news, and that it fed the suspect’s agenda. He wrote:

“[H]ostage-takings are pretty routine events in metropolitan areas. Crazed ex-husbands take their ex-wives hostage, bank robbers take cashiers hostage, carjackers take car owners hostage, and home invaders take entire families hostage all the time. These stories get the coverage they deserve, and it’s usually very brief.

Just because a nut job has staged his hostage-taking in the headquarters of a cable TV network, knowing that it would reap maximum publicity, doesn’t mean the press needs to volunteer itself and its audience as hostages, too.”

From my observation, the media wasn’t saturated with this story. In fact, I was able to watch an entire episode of “Days of Our Lives” on NBC’s New York affiliate with nary an interruption — no breaking-news update, not even a scroll. I did turn my attention to TBD’s streaming-video feed whenever “Days” got boring, and my interest in the story was no doubt fed by my ties to the area. (The Discovery building was two blocks from my former home.)

Cable-news networks like CNN, MSNBC and perhaps Fox probably covered the shit out of it, but one has to expect that. The federal government is still in recess, the mobile news crews are itching for action, and downtown Silver Spring is just over the Maryland border with Washington, DC. In that sense, I agree with Shafer: The story was low fruit for the bigger outlets’ picking.

But as a hyperlocalist, I would have been all over that story. Unlike ex-spouses, bank robbers and car jackers who take individuals hostage, the suspect in this case took control of a building that housed 1,900 Discovery employees. Resulting police activity tied up two major thoroughfares in the area near the peak of rush hour. And now the Discovery building, the crown jewel to Silver Spring’s drawn-out economic revitalization, is a crime scene. The hyperlocal implications of this event are massive.

Who’s confirming this shit anyway? I jumped into the nitpicking fray in real time via Twitter, when news outlets big and small began linking to Lee’s online manifesto — even before Lee had been positively identified as the gunman. There were also “confirmed” tweets that Montgomery County police officers had shot and killed Lee, though exactly who was confirming this was a mystery.

I tore everyone a new asshole for their unnamed sources and unfounded theories. The Poynter Institute caught flack, and even TBD general manager Jim Brady felt my well-intentioned, ball-busting wrath:

(Incidentally, check out Bettween.com for that cool new toy above.)

I realize that smaller news outlets often cite larger ones as sources. I’ve done it myself, though I’ll often label the attributed information as unconfirmed by my news organization. But citation and confirmation do not equate in my book — the former functions to cover a news organization’s ass from lawsuits, the latter serves to deliver accurate information to news consumers.

Too much unsubstantiated content bounced around the Twitterverse Wednesday, a lot of it tweeted by experienced journalists, myself included. Like an idiot, I tweeted my suspicions that Lee was the gunman after reading that the suspect was an Asian man with an extreme environmentalist agenda. Others tweeted the same thought, but as a reporter, I should have acted more responsibly before thinking out loud. I trusted my instincts when I should have verified them.

And that’s my hyperlocal take on a big hyperlocal story.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user katmere.

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.

It’s something that’s bugged me for a while, though it clocked me square in the face this summer. With a sizable Pakistani-American community here, larger news organizations — namely The Christian Science Monitor and Al Jazeera — tapped residents for their takes on relief efforts in Pakistan’s flood zones, development of a Muslim community center near the World Trade Center site, and the arrest of Faisal Shazad, a Pakistani American who confessed to planting a car bomb in Times Square.

All of them were good angles on national and international news stories, and they offered insight into one segment of the neighborhood. But as a hyperlocalist, would such stories be within the scope of my publication? Would I have to write similar stories around the zillion other immigrant groups in my hood — the Tibetan Americans’ take on China’s activity in their homeland? The Venezuelan-American reaction to whatever Hugo Chavez has to say? And on and on.

It’s enough to drive a hyperlocalist insane.

That’s when the Poynter Institute’s News University came to my rescue. (For the uninitiated, News U offers journalists online training, some of it free, much of it cheap, nearly all of it good.) Its free, self-guided seminar called “Reporting Global Issues Locally” offered tips on how to tie international events with local issues, without driving a newsroom into the ground and without necessarily focusing on only one immigrant group.

First, the course suggested taking inventory of a beat’s ethnic groups, spoken languages and immigrants’ countries of origin. Done. Next was an inventory of a beat’s big industries. In my case, those are restaurants and specialty food shops; grooming services and general retail; medical services, thanks to a nearby hospital; residential real estate; and automotive sales and repairs.

Then the magic happened. The course listed five international-news topics that could influence news on a local level:

• The wars and national security
• Business and the economy
• Immigration
• Health and the environment
• A catch-all heading that included religion, education, culture and sports.

And instead of just tying international stories with the local immigrants’ reactions, the course illustrated how these international events can truly impact everyone in the hood, regardless of their ethnic or national backgrounds. For example, international trade tariffs and product recalls can affect sales at local retail shops, regardless of which segment of the community patronizes those shops. Immigration reform can alter hiring practices across all local industries, whether it’s food servers for the hood’s restaurants, or doctors and nurses at the nearby hospital and its satellite facilities.

In other words, it’s not about the hyperlocal angle on international news. Instead, it’s about the international angle on hyperlocal news. Despite the neighborhood’s global roots, the fact is it is one cohesive neighborhood. Its residents might not share a common heritage or language, but they share the immigrant experience, life as Americans (legally or not), and in the case of my new beat, life as New Yorkers.

The course also discusses possible sources of information, but I haven’t gotten that far into it yet. I’ll save that post for when I get around to it.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user bondidwhat.

While that’s cooking, I’ve started learning more about my hyperlocal beat and the niche my future online publication might fill. First, the statistical low down:

The neighborhood covers an area of about 1.5 square miles and contains more than 71,000 residents, says the 2000 Census. Sixty-six percent were foreign born and 80 percent speak something other than English at home — and I’m not just talking about Central and South American immigrants speaking Spanish. From personal observation, I’ve seen and heard people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Nepal and Tibet; Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela; Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe; and a smattering from southern China, Thailand, South Korea and The Philippines.

Compare that with the beat my former publication covered: 22,000 people living within one square mile. Most of them were born in the United States, spoke English at home, and were either white or black. That small area and common language made coverage easy, and because most of the foreign-born residents were either Central American or Northeast African, it trimmed the number of international tracks I had to follow for those “local reaction to events back home” stories.

The diversity that makes my new hyperlocal beat so beautiful means I’ll need creative ways to gather, report and distribute the news. Right now, reporting and distribution seem to be the easy parts, as I’ve had some thoughts on that previously. The news-gathering part, on the other hand, will kick my ass.

Brainstorming on how to avoid that ass kicking will occur in the next few posts.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Samantha Decker.

“The mainstream media stole my news story and didn’t give me credit!”

I’ve heard that gripe from lots of hyperlocalists, and on Tuesday blogger Danny Sullivan illustrated exactly how it was done to him. In a detailed post, he showed how his original story — about a woman who’s suing Google for bad walking directions — eventually spun into content for CBS News and The Associated Press. Neither news organization attributed Sullivan as the primary source, he claimed.

That borderline plagiarism sucks to no end, and I don’t like it any more than Sullivan. But it happens. Hyperlocalists and bloggers unwillingly offer plump, juicy leads to mainstream reporters, who both appreciate the tip and refuse to acknowledge the competition. Likewise, small media bootlegs information from larger outfits. And sadly, hyperlocalists “borrow” quotes, images and other content from other hyperlocalists, sometimes without attribution.

There’s no foolproof way around it, but the tactics below might force news outlets to acknowledge in some way their original sources:

Use original images when possible. Sullivan’s story offered screenshots of Google Maps, which he embellished with a few arrows. The screenshots’ appearance on The Daily Mail and The Financial Post without attribution was what tipped off Sullivan to the growing problem, he wrote.

While Sullivan felt the screenshots were protected under his copyright (I believe they’re Google’s copyrighted derivatives), the use of originally composed maps, photos and illustrations might have given him more leverage against other outlets’ fair use of his content. They would have had to acknowledge Sullivan as the source, even if it was only in a “republished with permission” line and link.

Keep a tight grip on source documents. Sullivan based part of his story on the plaintiff’s complaint, a document filed with the US District Court in Utah. Sullivan said he uploaded the paperwork onto Scribd, a free web service that allows one to share or embed PDFs and other content. The magazine PC World then accessed the document directly, bypassing Sullivan as a source.

I don’t blame PC World for hitting the ultimate primary source, the complaint filed in court. But Sullivan might have been better off uploading the PDF onto his website’s host server and not onto an open social-networking service that allows viewers to print, download or embed the document. Self-hosting would mean any link to the document would have led back to Sullivan’s URL.

Of course, PC World could have found a way around that. But maybe a watermark superimposed over the original document could have shown Sullivan as the document’s initial, intended recipient. Personally, I don’t see a watermark disturbing the authenticity of a document, but if there are other thoughts on that, I’m open to hearing them.

When a story is stolen, blog the hell out of it. Sullivan did a terrific job of mapping where his story went and how larger media companies cannibalized it. The blog post eventually made its way through the Twitterverse, bringing attention to sloppy editorial practices and lazy reporting. He may not have gotten the attribution he deserved, but at least he drew attention to the problem and brought some recognition to himself.

Again, none of these tactics guarantee attribution or even a link. But if ripoff artists stumble over them in the process of their “reporting,” then I’m cool with that.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ratterrell.

So it was with great interest that I read this recent article in The New York Times about a startup clothing company that allows its customers to design their own shirts. Shoppers visit the company’s website, pick out colors, patterns and cuff styles, drop some coin and in four weeks, they’re rocking personalized gear.

The company’s success is rooted in its “emotional-value proposition,” says the company’s 22-year-old CEO. (Freakin’ hipster!) Customers play a part in the creative process, and what results is a personalized shirt that oozes individual expression. Okay.

That got me thinking: If consumers will pay to design a shirt, would they pay to participate in hyperlocal content creation? Does the emotional-value proposition apply to hyperlocal news? No and yes.

First, anyone who will pay to generate content is an advertiser. Consumers can usually distinguish an advertisement from editorial content because ads are labeled as such. But when an advertiser’s content is passed off as news, or if the hyperlocalist accepts compensation for creating “advertorial” content, then the news outlet’s objectivity comes into question.

Next, no one should create news content for the purpose of self-expression without fair compensation. That’s what larger media outlets like Forbes.com and The Washington Post call “content for exposure” (or more precisely, content for exploitation), and the practice only dilutes the quality of an organization’s content.

Instead, the emotional-value proposition can apply to opportunities for consumer feedback. A moderated comment section adds tremendous value to a news website. (The same goes for editorial essays printed on paper or broadcast as sound or video.) The opportunity to offer constructive criticism allows news consumers to express interest in their community, and the interaction reflects the news organization’s worth in the community.

That quality is perhaps the strongest selling point when approaching advertisers, sponsors and subscribers. It means that consumers do more than just consume a media outlet’s content. They assign value to it, they incorporate the information into their decision making, they allow it to influence their lives. That kind of quality far outweighs a website’s page views, a newspaper’s circulation or a broadcast outlet’s audience numbers.

The emotional-value proposition also applies to crowd-sourced content, but one should approach that with caution. I’ll get into that tomorrow.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kirsten Hartsoch.

Meanwhile, The New York Times requires readers to register with the site before leaving comments. And most recently, Hawaii’s Peer News announced it would close its articles to reader comments completely, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

What a pity that these news outlets should resort to ranking systems, registration and closed-door policies to moderate what is designed to be a two-way conversation. That type of open communication is the whole point of Web 2.0, a point that these outlets miss by a mile.

At the other extreme, readers should not be permitted to spew venom as anonymous specters adrift in the ethernet. After all, a news site is its publisher’s virtual property, and it’s the publisher’s obligation to establish a rule of order. One can manage the site like a erudite salon and ask (even demand) readers to conduct themselves with self-restraint. Or one can run the place like a bar (as I did with my former site) and allow readers to speak freely, smacking them in the back of the head when they get too rowdy, or bouncing them completely when they’ve had enough.

But if a publisher merely opens the door to an online establishment and expects visitors not to steal the virtual silverware at first chance, then all hope is lost for civil or constructive discourse. That’s what The Washington Post did, maybe in reverence to the First Amendment. As a result, its comment section is more like a landfill of bigoted rants and axes in search of grinding.

Sifting through ranked comments, or closing articles to comments completely, are terrible solutions. The former creates an echo chamber, where those ranking the comments (presumably other readers or the site’s staff) can amplify agreeable opinions and mute dissenting ones. The latter only makes the publication seem aloof, and can cut off potential story leads and angles for reporters to follow.

In the end, a website is its publisher’s blank wall. One can lead readers to paint a flowing mural of constructive ideas, or one can abandon it for graffiti artists and taggers to maul.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user cauchisavona.