With the unraveling of TBD.com came a camp of criticism from all sides. Most interesting — to me — was the label the site was branded: hyperlocal. Is a news organisation that covers the Washington D.C. metro area really hyperlocal?
Towards a definition of “hyperlocal” news… to be determined
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I had the same thought when I saw The Cardiffian describing themselves as hyperlocal.
I like to think of hyperlocal as being a small community sized region – perhaps a village, town, district or a street. If the word is going to lose all meaning though, we may as well drop the uber-trendy ‘hyper’ prefix. Just call it local.
a couple of quick points:
many hyperlocals don’t see themselves as ‘news-reporting’. grass roots sites report information that may or may not be classed as ‘news’ as well as events, commentary etc.
it’s cheating in a definition to duck the size issue. in general hyperlocal is about the small rather than the large. a hyperlocal for 5million people in washington or 8 million in London say doesn’t quite feel right. i suspect that if anyone plotted a distribution of perceived community size for hyperlocal sites the modal site would be somewhere slightly bigger than a typical neighbourhood but smaller than a small town.
good luck with your research
Fooman, I completely agree. Sites like SplottOnline and My Whitchurch are hyperlocal. Not so much The Cardiffian, yourcardiff or Guardian Cardiff.
Will, your two points are spot on. Part of “hyperlocal” is that it’s a blend of Joe Blogs and Joe Journalist doing it. Background likely shapes what people do, and how they view their site/facebook page/twitter feed/etc. And size… well, that’s sort of the point of the term hyperlocal, isn’t it?
Since I posted this, Columbia Journalism Review posted an interview with Jim Brady, the former general manager of TBD.com and visionary of it. He says straight off that the site was never meant to be hyperlocal:
“I think its goals were to be a regional site that had hyperlocal elements to it, and I think that’s kind of been lost in a lot of the discussion in the past few days—it’s just getting lumped in with, “Well, this is another reason why hyperlocal won’t work.” It was never considered a hyperlocal site at its core. I mean, we were geo-coding a lot of content, and we were doing a lot of things to try to target specific communities, but we never called it, ourselves, a hyperlocal site. That was really just how it was described by other people outside the building. I agree with a lot of people who say that it’s really hard to make money on hyperlocal; that’s why we decided not to do it.”
Read the full interview here:
http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/q_a_jim_brady_on_the_death_of.php
I think Will makes a very good point, there’s a difference between those looking for blogs that are about ‘community action’ and the more ‘news-based’ ones.
I guess with ‘hyperlocal’ it’ll never have a proper definition as every blog is slightly different to the next – and every area is different to the other. That’s the beauty of it all.