virtualeconomics

A citizen journalism model that really breaks news?

London-based citizen journalism start-up Blottr, which destealthed towards the end of February with a Techrunch write-up and recently announced a round of angel funding, led the news agenda for much of Monday by breaking the day's major UK news story. 

First publishing a few minutes after 10am, Blottr broke the news of a bomb alert in London and over the day added pictures, detail and coverage of the events in the square and the controlled explosion carried out in Trafalgar Square around 9am. Sky and the BBC picked up the story around 3 hours later, and Blottr founder Adam Baker told virtualeconomics:

"It was the only full story available of the incident for 3 hours, until Sky News put it as their "breaking" news, followed by the BBC. By this time, everyone discussing the story on Twitter (was) linking to our story, as the main source."

Hyperlocal is growing by shrinking

Hyperlocal is shrinking. Not the market, or the number of sites, or even the number of start-ups in the space - just a glance at the OpenlyLocal directory reveals that the sites are multiplying as quickly as ever. But the size of the communities that new local businesses and sites aim to serve are getting smaller all the time, with the latest websites and businesses launching in this space often aiming to cover communities of fewer than a dozen streets or a single postcode.

And that's potentially very interesting news for local journalists facing yet another round of newspaper cutbacks, because if smaller communities will support viable hyperlocal community websites there's potentially more jobs covering the news in those communities to go around.

In the US last year Patch.com hired more than 600 journalists (probably the most of any company in 2010) to roll out more than 500 sites to towns with populations between 15,000 and 75,000 people. But in the UK new businesses are already emerging with a plan for publishing hyperlocal community sites, with original news reporting, in towns of 5,000 people or fewer.  

Revisiting "what is Yahoo?" - Yahoo is local

I wrote yesterday about Yahoo's new (beta) hyperlocal websites - currently live in a few dozen US neighbourhoods but with big plans to expand to a footprint of 400,000 contributors. Yahoo's ambition to fill their local sites with original reporting makes this a potentially big deal for both the company and the hyperlocal space, but a massive pool of writing talent isn't all thay Yahoo brings to this party. In fact, hyperlocal makes genuinely intelligent use of Yahoo's notoriously diverse portfolio of acquisitions and there is the potential - perhaps for the very first time - to actually tie together a lot of Yahoo's bolt-on acquisitions as part of a coherent strategy.

Let's start with the news, which for this project Yahoo is both creating and aggregating. Yahoo is the web's most popular news site (not just aggregator but news website of any kind), by a factor of almost two. Say what you want about other people having better tech or better content, from an audience point of view what Yahoo does to aggregate news really works. For another, what Yahoo is pulling together here is genuinely good, relevant content - a combination of existing local blogs, local events, movies listings and original local content. 

 More importantly, much - maybe even most - of what Yahoo is "aggregating" is Yahoo's own content. Events are from Upcoming (acquired Oct 2005). Movie listings are Yahoo Movies. Original local content comes out of the new Yahoo Contributor Network (acquired as Associated Content May this year). The original local content may well be the killer feature across these sites, but it's far from being the only hyperlocal asset that Yahoo has brought to bear. 

More to Yahoo's local beta than meets the eye

When Yahoo launched its new beta local sites last week I dismissed it as another missed opportunity - late to the game, aggregation-based and covering too large an area to be really local at all. Cory Bergman at Lostremote commented similarly that "it seems to be a rather minor effort compared to AOL’s steep investment in Patch".

On closer examination, this is a real launch into hyperlocal journalism by Yahoo, with local reporters generating original local content aross well-defined local news beats. What Yahoo is calling hyperlocal really is hyperlocal - named neighbourhoods like San Franciso's Haight Ashbury with a population around 10k people. And this is already a more extensive newsgathering venture than it seems at first glance - click "other locations" and you get options for multiple Californian cities, several places in Michigan and a single line for Brooklyn in New York. Click Brooklyn and it turns out there's twelve New York neighbourhoods on the roster already. Below the surface of this beta launch there seems to be a fair bit of iceberg. 

Northcliffe Digital's localpeople trying out Storify

My old company, localpeople, is trying out Storify - check out a story about a local restaurant on the Westbury-on-Trym site with a long line of tweets after the article.  

 

It adds a lot of colour and interactivity to the article, although of course it does also and does not, as I previously claimed, lend itself to being gamed by anyone who fancies adding @casmia to a tweet and having it appear on the page. The Telegraph got themselves into a bit of bother when they tried something similar with the 2009 budget...

(via friend and ex-colleague Marc Cooper)

Moving on from localpeople

Today was effectively my last day as Head of Publishing at localpeople. As I told my team yesterday, having taken redundancy my plan for the foreseeable future is to have a lovely long rest (maybe a year or two, not joking) and spend as much of my time as possible playing with my lovely new twins (four months old this Saturday), barring anyone offering me the opportunity to do something so unexpectedly fascinating or well-paid that I can't resist.

Localpeople's been a great place to work, and I've had a lot of fun being part of the team that took it from a piece of market research and a strategy presentation in the DMGT boardroom to a network of 123 local websites. As I pondered to someone the other day, my best guess is that no-one, with the possible exception of Arianna Huffington, has enjoyed the opportunity to hire so many new journalists in the last eighteen months, and I've loved the job of finding towns in which to launch new websites, hiring and training Community Publishers for those sites and helping drive forward a genuinely exciting new venture at the intersection of journalism and social media. It's been a fantastic couple of years, a privilege to work with a great team and I wish localpeople all the best taking the business to new heights in 2011 and beyond.

Update: here's more on my move from Journalism.co.uk