Comments on: Hyper-Local News: It’s About the Community or It Fails

By: Pascale Lagahe

Pascale Lagahe — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:39:48 +0000

Faire de l’#hyperlocal, c’est avant tout une histoire de communauté que l’on sert >>http://t.co/LlvVXLrN

By: Angela

Angela — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:14:57 +0000

Matthew, Thanks for this article. I started an Australian hyper local more than 2 years ago called StreetCorner. We now have 5 sites in Sydney. From our experience localism is about giving local issues a platform and helping people to get action on the issues that matter to them. It isn’t about ‘passive news’, it’s about making things happen. The stories that get the most comments are always the ones that people want action on, be that a development or environmental problem. We now have a lot of Mayor’s, State Politicians and Councillors publishing on our sites and this has also been powerful.

Today the majority of our news is created by the community themselves, not Streetcorner though we do still publish local news. We do not aggregate from other sources because have never really seen the value in that nor the demand from the community.

Direct dialogue with local decision makers brings benefits for all, including for the politicans who are prepared to engage. We have more to do to make our sites even more useful to the community and so our next version of Streetcorner, due for release in 2011 will be quite different but is based on our learnings.

We welcome all comment and feedback from others who are in this space or are interested in this space..

Regards
Angela

By: Pam

Pam — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 13:40:04 +0000

I am all in favor of a good local news outlet. I saw you mention Topix in your story, however, and I cringed. That company is awful. Their lack of moderation and refusal to require users to register has turned a once good idea into an awful site where the attacks on people are like none I have ever seen and that is not good business. It destroys communities not builds them and manages to run off many people while inviting more cowards to come in and post trash. Hopefully another company will provide a good forum for discussion without taking the low road that the Topix company has.

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 14:58:49 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Tracy — West Seattle Blog is a great example of a community site that really seems to get the community aspect of local news.

By: Tracy @ WSB

Tracy @ WSB — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 05:36:01 +0000

No, a McDonald’s-esque operation can’t and won’t succeed, for exactly the reason you cite, and BLESS YOU for citing it … we have evangelized it for a couple years now, as one of the success stories in community-born, community-collaborative online-only neighborhood news. The only REAL scale in “hyperlocal” is springing up from the grass roots, not spray-on mass-quantity grass seed like P*tch. The Outside*in acquisition/merger/whatever is to me just a beacon shining on those sites’ inescapable fate, a monoculture sprawl of aggregation once the parent company realizes top-down/templatized does not work. No offense to the many fine newspeople who are toiling for P*tches right now … I hope more will consider going into business for themselves, starting their own community-news operations, with more freedom, more ability to truly serve the community, if that’s what they really want to do. You don’t need bloated traditional-media infrastructure to try to prop you up. And you don’t want national ads and national partnerships to infest your local site like weeds. Of the community, for the community, with the community.