Hyper-local is the new buzzword in the news business. As the battle for attention gets more relentless, this is the ultimate front line: the place where you fight for one reader (and one local advertiser) at a time with the information that is most personally relevant.
The Washington Post’s online salvo in this market (the experimental Loudonextra.com, launched today) offers possible answers to two of the questions that dog Old Media as it turns its attention to this business.
One is how you generate original "content" without breaking the bank. Against the deep web crawling of Google and Yahoo’s local services on the one hand, and the potential for free content supplied by citizen journalists and local bloggers on the other, how can the traditional newspaper model be adapted?
It helps that the company’s first hyper-local site aimed at Loudon County (a 300,000-person suburb of Washington DC, also known as LoCo) can draw on journalists already employed on a twice-weekly section distributed with the Post. Key to the project, though, is data that Google can’t reach. Post journalists phoned the county’s 400 restaurants, 180 churches and 100 schools to build an original database containing everything from dining options to local meeting schedules. Keeping this and other information up to date is projected to take the time of one person, according to Rob Curley, head of the team that developed the site.
The other question is how you build a compelling Web site capable of competing with the fast-improving local services of the big search engines – and doing that in an organisation not known for its technological innovation.
The Washington Post’s answer was to create a "skunk works" team to rush through new products like this. With lightweight database and Web services tools Curley reckons his five-person team can turn out services that keep pushing the envelope. Loudonextra is geo-coding all its information and a second release due next month will let users overlay this on Google Maps, he says.
Curley and Adrian Holovaty, the Post’s online head of editorial innovation, both cut their teeth on the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, whose prize-winning online work brought them wider attention. Holovaty’s database software (on display here in his compelling Chicagocrime.org) is the technological secret sauce that brings much of their work to life, says Curley.
It’s too early to judge how the LoCo experiment will turn out – but how many other traditional news organisations are working on models for innovation like this?
