Aug 25, 2010

Getting a hyperlocal grip on international news

The other day I whined about the challenges of covering a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual beat. Such diversity is a blessing (and I don’t use that term often), but all those story angles can shmear thin an already small newsroom.

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.

Aug 23, 2010

Whoever said it was a small world was a liar.

Getting my business chops together is a slow, painful process, but it’s happening. I’ve been reading about profit-and-loss statements and recently received free (yay!) legal advice on business structures. A summary of what I’ve learned will appear on this blog eventually.

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.

Apr 14, 2010

On air with The Hyperlocalist

I don’t care what the Pew people pollsters say about radio’s decline in the news ecosystem. I still think it’s a good way to reach underserved communities that live off the grid, as well as Silicon Valley techies sitting in slow California traffic. And that’s where guest blogger and fellow hyperlocalist Dan Hugo steps in.

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.

Apr 13, 2010

All the news that’s fit to text

My mother, a first-generation American like my father, made this observation a few years ago: Everyone in the old country communicates via text message. Calloused thumbs are the norm, regardless of age or social status. And if an event isn’t announced via text, then it’s as if it never happened.

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.

Apr 12, 2010

News on a cellular level

My father, a first-generation American, shared this observation when he returned from a trip to the motherland a few years ago:

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.

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