Backfence Is Dead: What About Hyperlocal?

paidContent reports that Backfence, the hyperlocal citizen journalism start-up, is dead:

Backfence, the once-hyped citizen journalism startup, is closing all its 13 local sites, after a series of management troubles over the last year, and inability to get any local traction editorially. CEO Mark Potts has also left, and told me in an e-mail that the investors are “continuing to talk to potential buyers or new investors, but have decided for business and operational reasons to shut down the sites rather than operate them without sufficient support.” Though the notice on the local sites say otherwise at this point: “The people behind Backfence still believe strongly in the need for community information services, and we hope to apply all that we’ve learned from our experience here to new endeavors in the future.” So for all intents and purposes, the venture is dead.

I have griped about Backfence rolling out with inadequate social features, in the past (see Backfence and The Social Tipping Point):

The complaints I have about Backfence are simply errors of omission in the user experience. The world is full of people, but Backfence is full of disembodied stories. What people are seeking online is connection and meaning through self-expression. Personal profiles and social networking should be the number 1 and 2 elements built, not an afterthought months later.

In this analysis, they just didn’t focus enough on letting people interact.

But does this mean something greater about citizen journalism (or artisan journalism, as I call it)?

1. Maybe we don’t need a theoretically benevolent corporation — like Backfence — to set up a context in which we journal our thoughts. The blogosphere and other rich social contexts already exist, and none of these smaller worlds have offered a very strong value proposition.
2. Maybe the models used are flawed. I am not sure that just because I live in a specific zip code that I am hyper obsessed with what goes on there. Yes, we have to act ‘locally’, but ‘local’ increasingly is coming to mean within your immediate social network, not the 20 blocks that rectangulate you.
3. Maybe these sites unknowingly or unwittingly owe too much to the old school media forms, and as a result don’t represent the break with old media that people are after.

I am still all over new media, and ‘hyperlocal’, but I believe it has to be ‘socoloco’: socially local.

Socialized news — news and analysis sflowing through our social networks — has not been worked out yet, but I think that’s what will emerge. Not the Backfence notion, where individuals would more or less act as the local reporters from the cheesy local paper that you leave in the driveway or lobby.

[pointer: Umair Haque]