John McQuaid, The Big Die-Off, And The Long Tail Of Hyperlocal

More reaction to the hornet's nest stirred by Jessica DaSilva, the Tampa Trib intern, whose blog post about the uncertain future of newspapers has led to a cascade of commentary, including my own contribution (see Janet Coats on The Church Of Journalism Is Dying), this time from John McQuaid (pointer from Jay Rosen):

[from The big die-off -- John McQuaid]

[...]

A massive asteroid has struck, sending shock waves through the media ecosystem. Old species disappear very rapidly; meanwhile various mutations emerge but most of them die off too. Only a few new species will actually thrive, then diversify and take over. We don’t know yet what they look like.

Such an environment is unforgiving. It rewards risk-taking, throwing paint at the wall and seeing if you get art. But rarely - risk-taking is still likely to fail.

Meanwhile, the default attitude of newspaper management is still caution and probity. And if you point a gun to the head of caution and probity and say “innovate or die,” don’t expect wonderful things to happen. Instead, expect buzzwords.

“Hyperlocal” is what market surveys say people want, and it makes a certain amount of sense, being the one thing a local newspaper can provide that the Internet cannot. But who knows how to do this well? Just scaling down the geography of coverage while using the same set of tools as before won’t cut it. News gathering operations have to become more flexible and informal: interact with the community, open up the exchange of information and opinion, and above all forge an interesting conversation. That means being provocative, cultivating original voices so that your site is always saying something new and interesting - not just serving up what happened at the community association meeting last night.

In short: we need more paint thrown at more walls. But there aren’t many true innovators out there yet in positions of authority, and those who are are struggling against an archaic institutional architecture that remains despite all the layoffs: everything from the strictures of AP style to the cluelessness of corporate overlords.

I think hyperlocal has to be a fully edged phenomenon for it to be anything. It can't be the online equivalent of the regional pages in metropolitan newspapers, with society announcements, the police blotter, and badly informed coverage of the school board meeting. No, it has to be completely turned inside out, and fragmented into bits that matter for close constituencies.

The long tail isn't just about retail choices at Amazon or Borders, its about the niche-ification of everything, as when the long tail meets human relationships (as in David Weinberger's brilliant 'continuous partial friendship' wisecrack in which deep truths lie).

In this context, hyperlocal will have to be hypersocial: it will have to be biased, take sides, stand for something, and be written by networks of partisans. It will have to be indigenous, written 'by us, for us' and not carrying over the myth of impartial, balanced journalism. In this way it will be neotribal, because hyperlocal sites will become rallying points for the vanguard in various movements that are inherently local, and will not seek to serve the greater community's hypothetical collective interests except to the degree that those align with the goals and activities of the tribe. (Note: this means that hyperlocal is inherently subversive, like unions have been in the past, since it cuts across political geography and political alignments.)

What the newspapers' management fail to understand is the end of mass: people simply do not hold with mass identity now that they are free to find human-scale identity, and once they find it, they will not go back. Newspapers and other mass media is falling first and fastest because we are rejecting the ersatz, mass belonging that they offered, as part of the expansion of the industrial Western democratic ideals. This means that we are rejecting both the good and bad embedded in that dream; but at core, we know that much of what makes up our dreams today has been manufactured, like the sequins on a designer dress, or the sparkle in a Hollywood starlet's eye.

Hyperlocal will have to be about people tooling their own partisan dreams, based on personal needs grounded in high affiliation social networks, focused on local activities. These dreams are likely to be unconventional, unpopular, and countercultural, because the discontented swarm at the edge, pushed aside by the powerful. Various groups in the same locales may be working at cross purposes, like ecofreaks versus tourists, or artists collaboratives versus condominium owners. All of these perspectives can be hyperlocal, but they cannot be blended into some newspaperish mutant based on a mystical sense of fairness, or a News At Eleven bland balancing act.

So McQuaid is right, in part, but he himself suffers from the same reluctance to dive into the mosh pit. As he said, "Just scaling down the geography of coverage while using the same set of tools as before won’t cut it. News gathering operations have to become more flexible and informal: interact with the community, open up the exchange of information and opinion, and above all forge an interesting conversation. That means being provocative, cultivating original voices so that your site is always saying something new and interesting - not just serving up what happened at the community association meeting last night." Being provocative is way not enough, and 'interacting with the community' sounds like we've been invaded.

No: nothing less than direct conversation from the partisans for the partisan will work. And I don't think there is a way for newspapers to get there. People working at newspapers today may be, or become, partisans, but the newspaper itself has no role to play in this hyperlocal, hypersocial world.

Comments

[denise young]

way to go! this is a great debate. keep pitching those rotten tomatoes at the 4th estate, stowe! denise

[Mark Potts]

Terrific, terrific post, Stowe. You're spot on about the need for hyperlocal products to be extremely varied in their approach. But even more so, your comments about the death of mass are so on target. The sooner newspapers come to grips with that truth, the sooner they can begin to develop the solutions, hyperlocal and otherwise.

[gregory]

i think you are saying that papers are simply out of the loop. good.

[Chris Anderson]

*Sigh*. I started my non-journalism career at Indymedia way back in 2001. What's happened to me-- what's happened to the world-- in the intervening 7 years to make me feel so old fashioned??

I am getting a little sick and tired of the endless blogsopherical linking of an economic / social reality (the possible end of "massness") with a normative claim (the end of "massness" is good thing, or at least, it's "inevitable," so we don't need to waste time talking about whther it's good or not). Marxists (remember them?) used to make this mistake. It's inevitable, so we don't have to judge it.

So let's take a second to evaluate. And let's start with a couple definitional questions -- what's the difference between a mass, a public, a community, a niche market, and a social movement? And since this isn't my blog, let's just take the difference between mass and public. To what degree does the end of the mass mean the end of the public?

Here's how John Dewey defined the public: when private actions have indirect consequences that affect large groups, that interest group becomes a public, with a stake in regulating the actions in question. Now it's possible to argue-- and I've done so-- that social movement groups, communities, and even nice markets are more authentically "publics" that the public represented by that idiotic word "public opinion." And in many ways the end of the mass, with the possibility of creating more authentic, democratic, and local communities, would mean a more public world, and could be a world where hyperlocal journalism, done the right way, could flourish.

The problem though is that, in some key ways, the mass hasn't gone anywhere. In short, the metro newspapers may be dying, but guess what, people still live in cities! Their lives are still affected by other people who may not be in their hyperlocal coverage area. And most importantly, cities are still ruled by things like mayors and city councils and corporations and chambers of commerce. One the things monopolistic, dead-tree journalism used to do, or should have done when it was doing anything worthwhile at all, was make the public real.

So bottom line: when we all live in a truly anarchistic, communitarian world (a world I wouldn't mind seeing) then hyperlocal journalism (again, done RIGHT, and I haven't seen much of it done right) will be all we need. The problem, though, is that we're not seeing that world emerge. What we're seeing is the growth and centralization of power -- the EU, the executive president, corporate consolidation, etc.

The metro daily may be dead, but the metropolis lives. Who's going to notice when the city council gives itself all new cars?

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/cityhall/20569644.html

Chris

[Mike Plugh]

Great piece, and "hear hear!" Sorry to copy and paste, but I wrote this in the DaSilva thread and I think we're on the same page.

"I’ve been arguing...that the newspaper and its news model is already dead. People don’t read newspapers anymore. In fact, people don’t watch TV news anymore either. The striking thing is, people don’t go to the net for news in the place of either medium. They just don’t follow the news. What’s changing that for a new generation of people, and a not so new group as well, is the blog collective. The Huffington Post is one such blog collective as is Alternet. These progressive media outlets function in some respects like a traditional news org, but are incorporating vlogs to deal with TV-style coverage and feature interactive comments.

Journalists and specialists of many kinds blog in these places and are paid for doing so. What they provide isn’t hyperlocal, but rather hyperglobal. They deal with every issue on the face of the earth, but do so outside the constraints of the failed, corporate media structure. The success they enjoy is a certain freedom to produce journalism that is edgy, opinionated, and takes a particular point of view. Objectivity is out the window as it should be. The comments sections offer the chance for readers (and now viewers) to provide feedback immediately and digest the news according to its perceived successes and failures. That’s what the audience wants. That’s why they’ve abandoned “one way media.”

The newspaper and television are dead because they are one way communication which don’t reflect the interactive sensibilities of the modern citizen. The practice of objectivity has left most news at the mercy of the pseudo event, press managers who feed the beast. People want to break through the BS, but don’t know how to do it. The answer is partisan journalism. For better or for worse that’s the audience."