Hyper Local News, the Vanishing Point Theory of News, and Evil Knievel
The tumultuous state of the newspaper industry is one that has not only been long in the making. Over the past couple of years, I've covered a number of different aspects of this change - an analysis that has only accelerated with the work behind SocialRoots. In many ways, I can relate to the utter blur that is the future. It's hard to see an empire die, especially one you've worked arduously to build and protect. Perhaps the hardest part, aside from the financial dire, is the potential dilution of values and practices.
An interesting post on Search Engine Watch got me thinking about the industry again. As is the usual coincidence, I had a conversation last night about the hyper-local business model after being asked if we now had ubiquitious WiFi in San Francisco now (we don't). Mike Boland does a great job summarizing the current state of affairs:
The reality is that the web has commoditized national news. The only way to differentiate it is to have a specific angle of coverage at which you excel (Wall Street Journal), or unique voices that demand a premium (New York Times). Notice that these are two major papers that can get away with charging for online premium access.
The third strategy is to leverage a position that can't be replicated by aggregators; local. This hasn't really been done in a meaningful way online by local newspapers, or any national publisher with a patchwork of local assets. The opportunity exists, however, to create attractive and unique local destinations.
We've seen the "nichification" of news in the social media universe - there's a blog, podcast, or video blog on almost any topic conceivable. Naturally, this is not new considering our history of online special interest groups (BBSs, newsgroups, forums, chats). the key difference, of course, is that the surface area for social media is simply an order of magnitude larger - propelled by not only the increased ability and reliance on search but also on the implicit and explicit social networks that connect these publishing posts - millions of regular people consume social media, they just don't know they do.
Which brings us to today, at the proverbial doorsep of a hyper-local movement. If we trust the signals from the major search players, we'd be safe to bet that there's gold in them mountains. There's no coincidence that Google, Yahoo, and MSN are building up their local ad serving technologies and partnerships in the preparation for the next arms race. Chris Anderson reminds us of another reason, the Vanishing Point Theory of News:
Our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us. For instance, the news that my daughter got a scraped knee on the playground today means more to me than a car bombing in Kandahar…There’s nothing new about this (it’s a truism of the American newsroom that Paris, Texas counts for more than Paris, France), but it bears repeating. The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn’t relate to our lives. I’ll start reading my “local†newspaper again when it covers my block.
Yet, I feel somewhat unsatisfied with this direction. I'm not sure why I feel separate from my "community." It could be that my lifestyle is near-nomadic. It could be a generational detachment from culture as a whole. I'm not sold that I need more of here. When I grew up, we had the Rockland Journal News as our local paper. I never read it. I did read the New York Times, however. Why? We were instructed to do so for school. We were made to have the impression it was "better", whatever that means.
It seems to me there's a slight gap, let's call it a blackhole, where the return on hyper local publishing has diminishing returns. Seems the distribution of interest has what resembles a Planck Distribution - does anyone remember these from school?
At the global and national levels, we're interested and that increases as we get more and more local. At the other extreme, there's the "news" as it pertains to our families and friends - our personal news network if you will. The gap, in the middle, seems to be where there's a current leap of faith that there is tremendous interest in what we call the "hyper local" news.
Surely, there is evidence that people are willing to create this type of media content. There's even evidence that it's being consumed. Of course, that evidence is still sparse and, more importantly, not contextualized relative to the other spheres of media influence.
Is hyper local news the Evil Knievel of media?
technorati tags:hyperlocalnews, chris+anderson, longtail, media, influence, news