Hashbrum - Birmingham HYPERLOCALIZED
Humans have relied upon their ingenuity to compact the maximum amount of food, oil, electricity, digital memory and basketball fans into the smallest possible areas since we stepped out of the cave. Now that we face the problem of having too many journalists for too few positions, it’s intuitive to say, “Well, pack ‘em up tight and make ‘em real cheap.”
Newsrooms have yet to fully adjust to internet news, so many freelance and unemployed journalists have turned to smaller venues, where “news” has always been present, but never the staff to cover it all. In areas around the world, where no paper ever bothered to focus its attention, professional and citizen journalists are beginning to pop up with super-small, super-select internet news sites.
Students at Birmingham City University, England, launched such a site to provide news to an area of Birmingham that has lost coverage as a result of thinned local print budgets. Hashbrum.co.uk will also be a tool for the students to find strengths and weaknesses of hyperlocal news sites, and test whether they would be feasible with a student/professional staff and contributions from citizens.
As of yet, the site has not broken any hard news (front page: local woman wins a Mini Cooper and how to make the perfect latte), and the layout is still pretty basic, but they are doing a decent job of integrating maps, videos and tweets into many of the stories. I really like the large map on the front page, with markers of recent stories around town –it’s interactive and simplistic, and if it was my home town, I might click on every point just to find what’s going on.
The Hashbrum site lays out its role as an alternative news source for locals, and Andrew Brightwell led a post today on that note. “One of Hashbrum’s stated aims is to try to fill some of the gaps in conventional news coverage,” said Brightwell. He is asking people around town about what is missing from local broadcast and print news, to get an idea of what niche the site may make home.
I did some Googling on the topic of hyperlocal news after finding this site, and was sad to discover the skimpiness in coverage of hyperlocal news and how seldom it is found in major news outlets. The most recent NYT stories I found on the topic were from April, on how difficult such sites are to maintain, and an August story (perhaps should have appeared in the obituaries) about WaPo’s decision to shut down hyperlocal experiment LoudonExtra.com.
I also think it’s worthwhile mentioning the “localized” sections now offered by the big news names. WaPo, as many regulars know, recently promoted its revamped Local page, and NYT keeps its Region page chock-full of school headlines and stories on dogs, good and bad.
But how concerned are these companies with actually focusing on such narrow topics, and thus, narrow audiences? The LoudounExtra-fail story highlighted the concerns of the big papers:
“The challenge … is that hiring reporters to cover car thefts, school board meetings and new store openings is expensive. So is hiring salespeople to visit local businesses and sell ad space.”
Touche.
On the other hand though, are the hyperlocal sites devoted to small news. Sites like EveryBlock and Outside.in are taking a whack at pulling together blogs, syndicated stories and actual publications from varying media. Patch, a budding New York-metropolitan hyperlocal site, is even accepting applications to hire local editors –some of my NJ and NY classmates will surely find this appealing.
For these resources to maintain their appeal, I think they will have to continually adapt to new technology –a lesson learned from the papers. EveryBlock seems to be the front-runner so far, with a customizable iPhone app (D.C. has 99 neighborhoods, 8 wards, 171 ZIP codes and 1,410 streets available), but it only covers 15 of the biggest cities in the U.S.
All in all, Hashbrum has a ways to go, but if enough of these hyperlocal sites sprout, I think we’ll see a “survival of the fittest” if you will, and with promise they could get picked up by businesses or accumulate into an entire monster of their own. Let me know what you think…
I checked out Patch (owned by AOL) and Everyblock (bought by MSNBC.com). Patch has better inter-active graphics, photos, layout and information. I was impressed by the amount of information from the restaurant pages to the school page.
It is interesting to see how local news is developing online, and how fast it is growing. Most of the information is merely being aggregated, and although there is some basic retelling of sports events, I think these sites will start growing and developing, and perhaps including more journalist content.
I still can’t tell where hyperlocal news sites are going, whether they will become community bulletin boards or develop into something more substantial.
How to monetize the content — something the Washington Post apparently did not manage to do with its local LoudounExtra site — will always be the deciding factor as to how much these sites grow.
For journalists, there appear to be two paths developing: hyperlocal, a good place to start out; or national/international. Maybe one day the hyperlocal sites, with the classified advertising they could generate, will support the national sites. And we’d be right back where we started!
Hi Brian, my name is Alex Gamela and i’m part of the HashBrum team. I really liked your post, and it raises good questions about the opportunities and the future of hyperlocal websites. We are dealing with those issues, and we’re happy that HashBrum was the starting point of your reflection.
Still, i feel the need to clarify some of the assumptions you made about the project.
First of all i’d like to say that Hashbrum is a school project, that has goals and ambitions, and generated some outside interest, more than we expected. The team is half of the MA Online Journalism of the Birmingham City University, and our backgrounds and origins are diverse. That just makes it all so much more interesting, but only two of us are locals, and there’s just one more british on the team. If you’re doing local journalism connections are your bread and butter, but we have managed to build them, and used our personal resources to create a solid contact network. But the project has only begun a little bit over more than two weeks, so you can imagine that many people never heard of HashBrum. Yet.
You’re absolutely right when you say that the layout is pretty basic, i was the guy who built the website and i know where it fails, and personally this is not my preferred moodel. But we were discussing the project for so long that we got tired of it and just setup a Wordpress website with some neat features, like maps. It was built in 15 hours, and is being tweaked now and then. I used a free template and just adapted it to our needs. So we can’t really say it has a front page, but a “latest post” list.
Editorially, we are still defining what can be really appealing to cover for the website, but we are experimenting a lot, with video, maps, slideshows, since this is the first time many of us are trying to use this tools for journalism. So that’s why we have those stories.
The project has evolved and shifted in orientation and methods almost on a daily basis since we first thought about it. But we decided that we should have a platform to show our work and build from there.
For me, what this proves is that you don’t need much money to create a basic local news website, just time and planning (we are planning along the way) and if i started HashBrum right now i’d do it differently. But it’s possible, and with the right attitude and people it can become, at least, interesting. I believe that we can build off-MSM websites dedicated to one single story, and make profit from it. Journalists are pirates now, or, more romantically, lonesome cowboys. We just have to draw faster.
Your post was very important for HashBrum – and me, personally – because your ideas resonate with my own opinion about it, and i am (we are) proud to see our work recognized by other future journalists. This only shows that we’re using scarce yet powerful resources, and that it is working somehow. Thank you for referring us in your great insight about hyperlocal media, and i wish the best of luck for your course and professional life. Just do it.