Friday, August 29, 2008

Hyperlocal news could work!

Well oh well... readership of newspapers is still in decline (but not half as quickly as advertising in them) and the media landscape continues to to shift. Yes, the continued growth of Press2.0, Citizen journalism/crowdsourcing, free online news and everything else associated with it has been given as the reason for this.

But one type of newspaper is showing a glimmer of hope.. the hyper local newspaper. Delivered locally and using locally-availabe sources, could this be the answer?
To quote Andy Lark:
There might just be one exception - where communities are strongest (say Austin [Texas]) papers might thrive due to their relevance and high-degree of localization. Where communities are most diverse (say New York), the broadcast form of print seems to be having less appeal in favor of real-time and highly localized digital ink.
State-side this trend seems to be growing, especially with a hybrid online & newspaper operation run by "enfant terrible" Rob Curley, picured below from his Fast Company article back in 2006. He started taking the local news content back to the community and in a multi-media way.

Its also happening over here in the UK and one example that blurs the lines between both is the G41 newspaper in Pollokshaws Road area of Glasgow. Its a website/newspaper that continues the trend of naming these hyper local rags after postcodes.

But could this glimmer of hyper-local hope... just be the last part of the newspaper industry going up in flames?.

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