What Happened To The Hype About Hyperlocal?

Two things today made me assess the small progress made in hyperlocal journalism to date, and to reconsider the direction we might be headed in.

First, I saw a tweet go by pointing to a WSJ story:

Keach Hagey, For AOL, a Costly Gamble On Local News Draws Trouble

Mr. Armstrong, has held his ground in defending Patch, which he co-founded in 2007 before he joined AOL, but he recently promised to make it profitable by next year. In a small step toward that goal, Patch said Tuesday it will cut around 20 jobs, or less than 2% of its workforce. The cuts will come from merging the management of its eastern and southern regional reporting operations.

Whether Mr. Armstrong can make Patch a success could determine his fate at AOL. As the ad-supported network has expanded to more than 850 towns from 30 in the past two years, its annual loss has widened sharply to more than $100 million in 2011, analysts say.

The main problem: It is tough to sell enough online ads to cover the cost of producing local news, especially while maintaining a local reporting staff and a local advertising sales force.

“I don’t think anybody’s figured out local yet,” said Rick Blair, an angel investor in several companies that run local websites.

AOL is losing $100M on Patch this year, and Ariana Huffington tried to integrate Patch into the very successful Huffington Post but then lost interest after Patch management chafed at her attempts.

My bet is that Patch will end Armstrong’s career at AOL, and Ariana will take over as CEO. She’ll either scrap Patch or integrate it totally into HuffPo. But to make it a ‘success’ Patch will have to become something very different from what Armstrong envisions.

Note that the Patch model is closed: there is no Patch for Beacon NY, where I live, and there is no provision for me or anyone else to start one. It’s all centrally managed, which just runs counter to hyperlocalism, in my view.

The second reason I am thinking about hyperlocal is that the Guardian — a group that really gets the web in a way that Armstrong seems not to — announced n0tice.org, their ‘open journalism toolkit’, which is a platform for crowdsourcing journalism capable of being used by publishers, brands, communities and developers.

I started fooling around with the tool, and immediately decided to wait for the iPhone app. I created a community ‘n0ticeboard’ for Beacon NY, where I now reside, in about three minutes. Check it out at beacon.n0tice.com.

The UX of n0tice.org is a lot like Tumblr: you login as an individual, and you can create and participate in various n0ticeboards, posting events, reports, or good to sell, swap or share. You can follow other users or n0ticeboards. And you can post to any n0ticeboards, so it is very open (which will lead to a moderation overhead, I am sure).

The Guardian plans to share revenues with those contributing, but has no firm date for that generation of the platform.

At any rate, two very contrasting approaches: Armstrong’s Patch which feels very 2005ish and limited to specific communities, and the Guardian’s n0tice which is based loosely on the basic model of Tumblr — much more contemporary — and based on ‘open journalism’ crowdsourcing. I just wish the n0tice iPhone app was available.

The Guardian project gives me hope that the dream of hyperlocal can really come true,  through a very open model of participation.

Huffington Takes Next Steps Toward Eventual CEO Role At AOL

Brian Stelter reports on a consolidation of control under Ariana Huffington of parts of the Huffpo machinery that had been consolidated into AOL, like marketing, technology, and business development groups.

This fits with my bet: Ariana Huffington will be running AOL before long, despite the new contract that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has signed. My bet is that Patch and others of Armstrong’s projects will fail dramatically, and he will have to resign.

In the short term, this may look like Ariana is simply gaining direct control of the tools she needs to make HuffPo work, but to me it looks like she’s laying the groundwork for the new organization, so when Armstrong’s day of reckoning comes she’ll have all the pieces in place for a new executive team to run AOL.

The Fall Of Mass Culture, The Rise Of Meaning

Ariana Huffington has a good sense of the turning of the tide in marketing, as a reflection of a fundamental shift going on below the hood in our society:

[…] the most important trend in marketing: the recognition by businesses that there’s much to be said for appealing to consumers’ better instincts, and engaging them with something other than materialism, sex, money, and self-interest. And it’s not a coincidence that this trend is escalating at the same time social media have risen to the forefront in the worlds of both marketing and activism. It’s all part of the changing zeitgeist and it’s only natural that forward-thinking companies would want to tap into it.

Right now, we’re in the transition phase — the marketing world still looks like a split-screen, with most companies going about things in the traditional way, but with many pioneering ones breaking new ground by building their brands while trying to help make the world a better place.

Marketing is often a leading indicator of where a culture is at and, even more, of where it’s heading. Marketing has always been most effective when it takes ideas that are in the air and crystallizes them, so that they resonate with us in ways often beyond our conscious understanding. This is what is so powerful about the combination of social media, marketing, and doing good.

I don’t mean to disparage the value of her observation, but because she is looking at this cultural shift based on what’s what in advertising, she is seeing the tip of the iceberg and analyzing its movements without factoring in the iceberg below.

The decline of mass culture that is going on in the Western world is the direct consequence of the splintering of media and our defection from the communities that mass media defines.

The other day I saw Pew numbers showing that almost nobody below 25 watches local TV news anymore, for example. Which doesn’t mean that these folks are uninformed about what’s going on, but that the ‘imagined community’ that local TV broadcasting tries to conjure into being simply doesn’t exist for them.

The ‘message’ of mass media is not about Iraq, American Idol, or the NY Yankees: it’s mass identity. And when people turn away from mass media — and mass advertising — they aren’t just becoming unaware of the goings-on on some reality show, they are walking away from belonging to a collection of cultural aspirations and obsessions.

And what fills the void for those that operate outside the limits of mass media, which are market-facing, and market-oriented? What happens when you aren’t bombarded with car ads, when you stop listening to music about bling and champagne, or you stop subscribing to fashion magazines telling you what to buy and wear?

One thing is clear: people’s extra-market motivations start to come to the surface. People begin to care more about connection in communities, the state of the world, and, at the most fundamental level, a meaning for existence.

This is being called social marketing. It’s a good term, for perhaps conflicting reasons. First, people associate ‘social’ with ‘social causes’, meaning ‘societal causes’ in a philanthropic sense. But more importantly, this marketing will take root in social media, where our connections to each other — the social context — is as important as the content.

This need for meaning often is trivialized as becoming cause-oriented, but our involvement in causes is the outgrowth of our desire to live meaningful lives, instead of as consumers.

I don’t mean this is some fuzzy spiritual way, some obsession with enlightenment or finding a path to heaven, but on a very practical day-to-day level. It comes down to this: How are we to spend our time, and what is worth being involved in?

Returning to Ariana’s points: yes, some marketers are hoping that they can affiliate with these aspirations for meaning. And in this transitional era, where both mass and social media are prevalent, we will see very different Super Bowl ads in the coming years.

Ariana cites Derrick Daye, who is new to me, for coining the term ‘ethosnomics’:

Brands increasingly must stand for something beyond just rational items. Brands can’t, however, just ‘stand for’ the cause du jour. Doing what others do, just because they’re doing it, won’t work very long or very effectively. Corporate social responsibility efforts will need to be believable, sustained, and engaging. Some of the strongest will come from those brands that connect the public and the personal in today’s financially-strained world.

Yes, we will judge them by their works, but a soda company won’t buy our allegiance by talking about clean water in Africa. They will have to recast their business so as to not be doing harm, open up transparently, and to actually be viewed as being motivated by extra-market motivations.

In a time when things is so bad, businesses can only hold us by dedicating themselves to a better world, even if they have to totally transform themselves — even if they have to invest everything they have — to do it.

Topolsky (Surprise) Leaves AOL

This is no surprise: Topolsky has left AOL, and Joining Jim Bankoff at SB Nation:

Joshua Topolsky, This is my next project

Of course, the natural question I’m sure a lot of people have is: why SB Nation? The easy answer is that the people at SB Nation share my vision of what publishing looks like in the year 2011. They think that the technology used to create and distribute news on the web (and mobile) is as important as the people who are responsible for the content itself. And that’s not just pillow talk — SB Nation is actively evolving its tools and processes to meet the growing and changing needs of its vast editorial teams and their audience communities. They’re building for the web as it is now.

I am very interested in here what they think the web is now.

I know Jim Bankoff reasonably well: he was the exec at AOL that bankrolled one of my favorite disasters, a project I worked on with Greg Narain called Nerdvana. Bankoff is incredibly sharp, and once he was pushed out by Falco, our project died the death of a thousand cuts.

SB Nation seems smart, and, Lord knows, the media space has a long way to go to catch up to our new expectations here in the post-everything economy. Topolsky is a smart guy, but I would really like more details.

I wonder what this means about the politics in AOL? Huffington shows up, and is put in charge instead of Topolsky. And the unending, high-friction interaction with Arrington at Techcrunch was yet another incentive to fly,