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.

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.

The Promise Of Hyperlocal Social Networks

I am a great believer in the premises of hyperlocal social media and hyperlocal social tools, as well.

The issue in both niches is to figure out what it is that people naturally want to do on a hyperlocal scale, and we have had a number of experiments that have demonstrated this invariant, which I will dub as the Law of The Excluded Hyperlocal:

Whatever it is that people will naturally do in successful hyperlocal media or tools will turn out not to be what they do in successful non-hyperlocal media or tools.

Or, more simply,

Any successful hyperlocal social tool will not look like Facebook with neighborhoods.

There is a lot of new experimentation going on around hyperlocal social networks. I was an active user of Plazes, way back in the day, and I gave Dodgeball and Brightkite a real try. But I have been uninterested in Foursquare — perhaps I am outside the demographic? — and haven’t really clicked with that, or Gowalla, or Facebook’s recent efforts. For me, they are failing.

However, I have been having some interesting discussions with the folks at DeHood about their product directions. [Disclosure: DeHood is a client.]

To be completely truthful, when I first saw DeHood back at the NYC TechCrunch Disrupt, I thought they were trying to do too much, because of ignoring the Law Of The Excluded Hyperlocal, and that the result was a sort of jumble.

However, I now consider DeHood as an ongoing experiment around a number of ideas about using online social tools to increase connection in the offline world at a local and hyperlocal level. They have just released a new version of their iPhone app, as part of their product push.

For example, DeHood supports the idea of users posting ‘news’ that is locally relevant and findable, like this example from London, where the topmost post is about a local flooding.

This highly localized, ‘souveillance’ by on-the-ground observers strikes me as a good pivot of local social involvement. Like announcing the empty space on the corner is going to be a chocolate shop, or that the Smith’s house has finally been sold.

One of the topics I have been talking about with Babak Hedayati, the CEO of DeHood, is how people might interact around location.

DeHood has implementations of Foursquare-like gaming around being a regular — in this case, being the king or queen of a location, but I am more interested in the idea of being a ‘local’: someone with a great deal of local knowledge. Which dry cleaner does the best job? Where are the best happy hour cocktails on a Thursday afternoon? Those sorts of questions.

DeHood also allows users to explore far away cities, although the implementation looks like the stream of updates that a local would get, which I think has to be reconsidered, because non-locals won’t know enough in many case to make sense of information that is purely of interest to someone on the ground — like a local flood in Putney, outside of London — and are more likely to want to see sights of interest to non-locals, like famous museums, monuments, building, restaurants, and so on. I think the intersection of non-locals with knowledgeable locals is a very interesting area for future investigation.

But Babak has some interesting ideas about getting down to smaller locales, and supporting people’s interaction around those smaller radius areas, like well-known districts in major cities, like SOHO in New York City, or even areas that are only well-known by their denizens, like the South Park neighborhood in San Francisco. We recently talked about the idea of ‘20 minute’ neighborhoods, which is a concept that has been advanced by Sam Adams, the mayor of Portland, Oregon. A 20 minute neighborhood has all the amenities within a 20 minute walk: stores, bistros, post office, schools, parks, metro, etc. So one angle is to work this concept into DeHood, in future releases, so that stores, businesses and individuals would be ‘tagged’ by these locational cues.

related articles

• Why Be Mayor When You Can Be King? FourSquare Competitor DeHood Adds New Features (readwriteweb.com)
• DeHood for iPhone update goes hard. (thenextweb.com)
• DeHood’s New Products Merge Real and Virtual Neighborhoods (prweb.com)

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]