We Don’t Want Hyperlocal News, We Want Social News

AOL is diving into a shot glass from 100 feet up, betting huge amounts of cash on local media, a sucker’s bet. The list of failures in this area boggle the mind: Backfence, Bayosphere, Outside In, TBD, Loudon Extra, Everyblock, and now AOL’s Patch, which might be the biggest dodo of all:

Mathew Ingram,  Can Patch Become the Huffington Post of Local News?

The bigger issue for AOL is that even if it manages to hit the Patch ball out of the park, and creates thriving communities in hundreds of locations across the U.S., it’s not clear whether that’s going to be a good business or not. Building online communities is all well and good, but generating revenue and profits is what AOL really needs to do. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post shut down their local ventures in part because they didn’t generate enough revenue to make them worthwhile. So far, Armstrong hasn’t made a strong case for why Patch should be any different.

AOL says it expects to generate local advertising revenue from its Patch sites, but admits this isn’t even close to happening yet. Meanwhile, it plans to continue pouring millions into this unproven hyperlocal strategy. Tim Armstrong just keeps piling his chips higher and higher on his Patch bet, but the odds of winning continue to be extremely slim.

The message of the web is being missed here, again, by folks like Armstrong. People are breaking free of mass media, so we don’t watch the Evening News together like folks did in the ’50s and ’60s, or reading the Daily Blatz on the train every morning.

But we aren’t replacing that 20th century behavior with watching the Hyperlocal Evening News or reading the Hyperlocal Daily Blatz, either. We haven’t shifted our allegiance from the nation or metropolis to a zipcode, which is after all just a smaller mass.

No, we are defecting from mass identity — which is the real message of mass media — to social identity. And social identity is not based on zipcodes, it is based on connections.

We are building intentional communities: by picking who to follow, not by moving into some utopian neighborhood.

And we want our media to follow those intentions, to support the communities we are crafting through connection.

So Armstrong and Huffington will have to give up on Patch. It is trying to do the wrong things for the wrong motivations. There is no constituency for Patch, because there is no single public that cares in the same way about geographic locales, any more.

(This turns out to be a similar problem for geography-based politics, too, by the way.)

Patch attempts to solve a problem people don’t know they have. They feel informed — if anything, they feel like they have too much information.

AOL would be better off look at solutions like News.me, Percolate, and Flipboard. These are based on the social news flowing in the streams of tools like Twitter.

News is better when it is delivered through people I trust, and then it is ‘near’ me in my social net: that’s the only sort of local that works. It will overlap with hyperlocal, in part, but incidentally.

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]

First Look: Dan Gillmor and Backfence

Dan has folded Bayosphere into Backfence, a community “information network” based in DC, and moved his blog there:

[from Welcome to Backfence]

The new site will reflect Backfence’s hyperlocal style much more than mine, though as noted I’ll continue to blog here and do everything I can to make this transition a smooth one. I will offer my advice to Susan DeFife, Mark Potts and colleagues at Backfence, and I hope you will, too. But they will make the final decisions.

Backfence is about local news and information, and we hope you’ll be part of that more local conversation. For example: Post your views about local issues. Share with us your favorite place in the area to have a burger, or your tip on a good local plumber. Let everyone know about a community event you’re putting on-and then tell everybody (don’t forget photos!) how it went.

So I looked, and Backfence actuallly is up and running for Reston VA, where I “live” (I am gone a lot). Here’s a news story about the repairs going on at a footbridge near me, at Lake Anne. I posted a comment:

I am a great fan of the hyperlocal movement, and I am happy that Dan’s foray into that with Bayosphere is being consolidated into something that seems to have some real forward momentum.