How local does local have to be? That’s something the Washington Post is probably asking itself as it tries to breathe new life into its experimental local online service (we wrote about it here last year. According to this report in the Wall Street Journal today, it hasn’t been faring so well.)
The Post’s idea was a site that could get under the skin of Loudon County (population: 300,000), which lies to the west of Washington. Tapping into local advertising as it moves online could be an important business for newspapers. But it seems that Loudon is too big and disparate a place – it has five disconnected population centres and no single local identity. The Post tried to use high-end production and journalistic values to bring life to local news.
(Aside: One of the brains behind the Post’s online experimentation, Adrian Holovarty, has quit to try a different appproach at local with EveryBlock, which we wrote about here last month.)
When I spoke to Chris Tolles of Topix last week, he was pushing a very different approach (Topix is backed by three big US newspaper chains and claims 6m unique visitors a month, up from 4m a year ago.) Tolles’ recipe for drawing online users to a local news and information site is to throw any pretense at journalistic ideals out the window:
Content doesn’t need to be good, it needs to be local. If your neighbour was ranting about another neighbour, you would read it. Journalists have a hard time with this – you have to abandon controls to make it work.
Harnessing user-generated content on news sites is a difficult trick to master. The Topix approach is to create tools that make it easy for anyone to post an opinion on what’s happening in their neighbourhood, use a small amount of news to seed the conversations, and then get out of the way.
According to Tolles this works best in towns of 10,000-50,000 people, which are small enough for inhabitants to identity the town unit as their local domain – places like Welch, West Virginia and Natchitoches, Louisiana. Thanks to Topix’s overall scale on the Web, these local conversations can sometimes rise to the top of search rankings (a Google search for “news welch west virginia” brings up the Topix discussion as the first result.)
Interesting (and cheap.) But it still doesn’t answer some fundamental questions. How do you become the first place people turn to for the local conversation, rather than just one more user-generated content site gasping for the oxygen of attention? And will local advertisers want their messages to be displayed alongside this type of content – even if you could find an economic way to reach them all?
