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From local news to hyperlocal anarchy
June 4, 2008
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?
As social networks are reliant on hubs (the well connected individuals that draw everyone together through their multiple connections), so local community networks need the community “hub” to be the driver. Identifying these individuals is the challenge and there will be different levels of community from the street level neighbourhood watch through the local school PTAs and the local council or church meetings.
Local communities and networks tend to come together around a common purpose or interest. This may not be geographically driven but if it has a sufficient impact on the local physical community then it will draw interest. This shifts the idea of on-line local social communities into the realm of lobby groups and protest groups. And in turn it requires a local champion to become the hub and drive the connections.
People will naturally turn to something if they feel not doing so will disadvantage them, isolate them or cause them to miss out. Local advertisers could still see this as potentially valuable although it won’t be long before the irony of a house builder advertising their new estate alongside a group protesting about the very same development occurs.
Posted by: Andy Warren | June 5th, 2008 at 11:31 am | Report this commentI thought I answered at least one of your rhetorical questions there…
The answer to being the #1 place to turn to for local conversation is a tautology — You need to become the #1 place where people are talking. It’s not like there’s going to be one place decreed to be the #1 site at some point — it’s going to vary by locality.
I would posit that in San Franciso, the answer is craigslist, sfist or the Chronicle. In many towns across the US, the answer is going to be Topix.
Posted by: Chris Tolles | June 9th, 2008 at 3:49 am | Report this comment