First, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) unleashed its draft policy recommendation “to support the reinvention of journalism.” While the document suggests the IRS recognize novel small-business structures for nonprofit tax breaks, it also pitches ideas that would keep small media outlets from doing their thang.

A tax on large broadcasters would relieve them of obligations to provide “public-interest programming,” like the kind a hyperlocalist would produce. A 2-percent tax on advertising sales would add a layer of meshugas to a small content producer’s books, as well as add an extra charge on local advertisers. Increased postal subsidies and a tax on accessing the mobile web would favor large print publications over hyperlocal newspapers and websites.

These proposed taxes would go towards establishing a national local-news fund, doling out university grants for investigative journalism, and tax breaks for hiring salaried journalists. Personally, I oppose government money in the media piggybank, and while a tax credit for hiring journalists is nice, hyperlocalists generally rely on freelance or volunteer contributors. The FTC document doesn’t do enough for small media.

And then there’s what Apple CEO Steve Jobs had to say at The Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference. The appointed messiah of media told conference participants, “I don’t want to see us descend to a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now,” PaidContent.org reported Wednesday.

One might quip that Jobs’ disdain for blogs stems from the Gizmodo iPhone fiasco, but I think there’s another reason. While bloggers (and the online hyperlocalists who have that title hanging over their heads) create oodles of content, they probably don’t have the financial resources or tech savvy to distribute that content through an iPhone or iPad app. That’s money out of Jobs’ pocket and control out of his hands.

According to PaidContent, Jobs followed his swipe at bloggers with: “Anything that we can do to help The New York Times, The Washington Post and other news-gathering organizations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid so they can keep their news gathering and editorial operations intact, I’m all for it.”

Sadly, Jobs doesn’t recognize the original news gathering that hyperlocalists and bloggers do, and how some of those large media outlets base their “reporting” on a smaller outlet’s original stories. Again, I suspect this elitism stems from the lost potential of app sales: The iTunes store sells iPhone apps for The Times and The Post, as well as a Times app for the iPad.

Where is the love for hyperlocalists? When did innovation and imagination (the kind that Apple touts in its advertising) fall victim to monopolies? Instead of encouraging new voices and new investment, the FTC stifled them to preserve the industry’s collapsing status quo. And instead of lending Apple’s devices to new experiences with content, Jobs whittled them down to technological troughs for whatever iTunes’ gatekeepers deem worthy of consumption.

My advice to the FTC and Jobs: Beware of false profits.

Images courtesy of Flickr users 1Happysnapper (photography) and reelsinmotion.

When you think “hyperlocal” or “community journalism,” you probably think blogs, newspaper-style articles or some sort of written word — I did. Clearly this is not the only way to go, and in August 2009 my colleague Kevin Fox and I tried a new angle on hyperlocal media in a project called Radio Sunnyvale (Calif.).

It wasn’t “real” radio at first, though we did toss around the idea of somehow getting our content broadcast somewhere in the area. We started off on my couch with “The Dan and Kevin Show” and talked about simple things, including the warning horns on the Caltrain that would pass by during our podcast recordings. By October 2009, our programming had diversified with city-council candidate interviews, special segments, and a well-received interview with the city manager.

Because our programming was not bound by time slots, hard breaks, and FCC regulations, we would post our content as recorded, without looking for sound bites or removing what we felt might be boring. If someone had something to say, we would put it up. Bringing as many people as possible to the table was the general idea.

We were well received — one operator of low-power AM radio offered to take us from a podcast to an on-air broadcast — but we were not necessarily well timed. With the declining economy, even the most supportive of Sunnyvaleans were not able or interested in contributing cash to the cause. Real interest did not translate to financial support. Even with our negligible operating budget, there was a need to pay the founders so that they might continue to reside in the city of interest. Ultimately, this was our undoing.

A traditional advertiser-funded model might have worked in an established medium, but visionary funding is needed when trying something new. A reasonable economy may have made that more likely. Creating a nonprofit entity probably makes sense, and we seriously considered making a community advisory board to keep the effort community-driven, at least in part.

Radio-style programming in the hyperlocal space is an exciting opportunity despite the financial difficulties we encountered in our first go. A better business plan, segmented shows, and a solid user interface for our podcasts are things we would attack first if we had to do it again. Also, a better way to measure our audience size would have given us more momentum when approaching potential advertisers.

Enabling real voices and real discussions without editing is a powerful proposition that builds trust between the community and its media efforts, as well as between people within the community. The discussion can flow and it can reach people who want to participate. There is still much to be done. To be continued?

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Burnt Pixel.

That’s how things roll, not just in my parents’ country of birth but across a big swath of the planet, according to The New York Times. Outside the United States, text messaging is used to find jobs, transfer funds, even monitor elections for fraud. These people don’t worry about broadband service for their iThingies, as long as the cell phone towers keep pumping out the juice.

I’m willing to bet that if people abroad are texting like fiends, their emigre counterparts in the United States are doing the same. They’re reconnecting with friends in the motherland and making new connections here, all via text messaging. Why shouldn’t they receive hyperlocal news in the same way?

Unfortunately, there are a few hurdles to that, namely the cost to send and receive text messages in the United States. AT&T charges $20 per month for unlimited texting on top of its smartphone data plans, and Verizon has a text-heavy plan for $35 each month, excluding voice telephony. Compare that with the one-cent text rate offered by one Indian carrier, The Times reported.

Another sticking point is the need to send bulk messages from a single source. Google Voice and Twitter allow a few text messages for free, but broadcasting more will require a paid account with SMS Everywhere or some other service. It’s possible to have a sponsor shoulder this cost for the hyperlocal outlet, but it doesn’t dodge the next hurdle.

And that is: What kind of information should be sent via text? Should the standard 160-character message contain only a headline with a link? Will the recipient follow that link to the full story? If yes, will the full story appear in a mobile-friendly format?

Also, in what language should the text and full story appear? If the goal is to reach immigrants, then the content probably should appear in their primary language. This might mean the cost of hiring an interpreter who not only can convert an English-language story into some other tongue, but can text the story using that language’s colloquial abbreviations and acronyms.

There are kinks to texting news content, but I still think it’s worth exploring if the objective is to deliver news to traditionally underserved immigrant communities.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user daveblume.

Even in the most isolated rural villages, where modern plumbing doesn’t exist and electricity is unreliable, everyone owns a cell phone. Gone are the days when Ma Farmer clangs a pot with a wooden spoon to draw Pa Farmer in from the fields for supper. Now it’s just a matter of flipping open a phone and dialing his digits.

The cell phone and other mobile devices have also affected American life beyond the traditional 3:30 p.m. call to ask the spouse what’s for dinner. According to the Pew people pollsters, these devices are erasing the digital divide between white Americans and their black and Hispanic counterparts. Check out these numbers:

• On a typical day, 59 percent of whites hit the web through a hardwired computer. Only 45 percent of blacks do the same.
• However, blacks and Hispanics hit the web through their mobile devices about 42 percent more often than whites, despite equal ownership of such devices.
• Altogether, blacks and whites did the same number of activities online, regardless of how they accessed the net.

This leads me to ask: If a hyperlocal news outlet delivers content — including pretty pictures, big graphics, and Flash video — strictly through mobile-unfriendly websites, then who’s actually receiving the news? If the hyperlocal beat consists mostly of people who can access the web by a desktop or laptop computer (regardless of race), then web design doesn’t matter.

But for those outlets operating in communities where residents tend to access the web on mobile devices (particularly cell phones without full HTML browsers), then it may be time to consider a phone-friendly layout that can be delivered without the benefit of an app. That means fewer photos, zero multimedia, strictly text content. It also means tighter, more concise writing, shorter leads, and perhaps use of the standard “inverted pyramid” format instead of a conversational, bloggy style of writing.

I haven’t done research into how a hyperlocalist would create a phone-friendly layout, but it seems any common web-publishing tool will do as long as the content’s structure and layout are simple enough for a phone to digest. (This does NOT include Google’s Blogger, which tends to have painfully slow download times on mobile devices.)

I’ll touch on news distribution via text message tomorrow.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user kristi-san.

Some of them can’t afford a computer or monthly internet service charges. Others don’t bother with the English-heavy net because they speak some other language. Still others live beyond the cable company’s reach. Whether by choice or necessity, these people just don’t do the web.

That doesn’t mean they should go without access to community news. What it means is hyperlocalists must apply a different approach to news distribution, even if that means using technology that’s distinct from their primary mode.

One form of news distribution familiar to non-techies is probably print. (There’s also broadcast, but I’ll get into that later this week.) Most online hyperlocalists use broadsheets only as marketing material — it’s much cheaper than handing out free iPads to prospective readers. Recently, California Watch printed an investigative report for distribution and promotion, and I’ve done similar stuff with content from my former hyperlocal site.

But what if the broadsheet were to become a regular thing for online outlets? Obviously, printing content with the same immediacy as posting online would be expensive, perhaps prohibitively so. But a daily or weekly broadsheet should be enough to deliver news in a timely way.

Also, broadsheets don’t necessarily have to be fliers given to individual readers. Back in the day, broadsheets were single, poster-sized sheets of paper posted in town squares and gathering spots. The same can be done today at coffee shops, supermarkets, transit stations, houses of worship, or the shop windows of supportive businesses. (Perhaps those supportive businesses can even pay for printing costs in exchange for the foot traffic the broadsheet might bring.)

I haven’t compared the cost of printing a single large sheet versus a stack of letter-sized fliers. But posting one big broadsheet certainly would cut down on the cost and energy required to distribute fliers to individual readers.

The best part: no net neutrality required.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Dorrell Merritt.

For hard-core techies, that scene signals the end of civilization. But my temporary disconnect from online reality gave me a greater appreciation for real reality, the one that exists (and it does) beyond the internet.

It also allowed me to consider how hyperlocalists can better serve the underserved — and by underserved, I’m not just talking about plugged-in communities without a local newspaper or news website. I’m talking about communities that don’t even appear on the grid: lower-income neighborhoods without broadband, communities in which English is not the primary language, even sparsely populated rural communities.

The net might not penetrate those areas, but hyperlocalists can still serve them using different, even “primitive” technologies. Expect the next few blog posts to look into this idea.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Spikenzie.