Doom and gloom, let me introduce you to hope and hard work
A friend brought this article, Hyperlocal Websites will Boom in 2009 as Community Newspapers Fold, to my attention. If I subscribe to all the opinions in it I’d have to be pretty scared considering I work for exactly the type of community newspaper the author is talking about.
But, I have to believe there’s a way out for us here at ECM Publishers. I have to believe that we can find a sustainable model for community news that, yes, relies predominantly on online news, but may also have room for a print product (perhaps a subscription model as I discussed in my last blog post.)After all, companies like ECM Publishers have substantial resources that, properly deployed, will allow us to compete as the hyperlocal news source and as a profitable business.
We can talk about citizen bloggers, but which citizen blogger is going to cover the school board, the city council, the business community, the church community and the arts and entertainment beats when there are no longer any newspaper web sites to link to?
We can talk about hyper local citizen journalism, but who will separate the community gossip and speculation from fact? What kind of consistency will we get in terms of coverage and follow up?
These points may be argumentative, but my big question is, what really will happen to blogs and local news aggregator sites if the business of news completely fails? Someone has got to do the digging, the interviewing, the photographing, the video taping, the research to keep government accountable, to make education and business transparent, and to showcase local feature stories and entertainment news. Do we expect all of that from someone doing the work part time and without pay? That kind of person has to be EXTREMELY motivated or out to push their own agenda.
Granted, us journalists can be egotistical. We believe we offer a pretty valuable service and we believe we do it better than anyone without a journalism degree. We could stand to be knocked down a few pegs. We also need to do our jobs better. We need greater accountability (some of which is trickling in with the dawn of community bloggers who can take us to task.) And, we need to adhere to the professional ethics and journalistic standards we were taught and claim to value so much. We need to nurture our curiosity as well as expand our curiosity to play devil’s advocate to our own assumptions and bias (political, religious, or otherwise.)
I still believe in the “professional journalist”. I still believe that quality reporting is a valued comodety. But, we face the automation and outsourcing of our “information providing tasks”. In 2009 and beyond, we have to show that our work can’t be substituted with some poor faxcimile of true community news reporting or patchwork of blog posts. We have to set ourselves apart in all forms of media.
There are some of us out there, myself included, working on shifting how we do our work to include going to more public events such as school board and city council meetings ourselves and doing our own leg work for articles we publish. Hell, I’m working on something now that will be the biggest project I’ve done ever and I’m finding out what a pain in the ass it can really be.
I have a lot of respect for the work that the local journalists do and while I agree that “hyperlocal” blogging will pick up, I doubt that it would be one person at the helm. I could definitely see teams of bloggers working together, in their free time, to support the kind of operation you may be alluding to. I’m sure the quality of the content will be just as high as what is provided by the local papers now, but I’m absolutely confident that the volume won’t be anywhere near the same. Is that a bad thing? Is the volume that is currently produced something that is necessary? Are the great, important and interesting stories being buried because volume is a requirement?
In the end, I believe that hyperlocal blogger will all depend on two things:
1. Readership. Are the people in the area that the hyperlocal blogs run willing to ditch their traditional and comfortable medium for something that may be a little different a bit more on the opinionated side? Will these blogs be able to hit the ground running and share the readership that already exists and perhaps even have people make the move to it or will they have to spend time nuturing their own subscriber base?
2. Money. Can hyperlocal blogs raise the level of operation to meet the needs of the majority of readers within the limited budgets they are likely to possess?
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For me, I spend about 1.5 hours a night working on my content (depending on the day obviously, but that’s a general average). I figure that in order for me to expand my coverage the way I want to (more than just going to meetings and digging to find/write one or two stories a week that may not have had much (or any) coverage in the mainstream) then I’m going to have bring in more revenue than I currently do in order to pay for the extras like time and travel that I don’t have to worry about at this time. I have been slowly working towards that (and meeting my projections) but I would like to see even more to get where I really want to be and that may require me to look into hosting advertisements for local establishments which is not something I think would work with the way my content is currently written ;-)