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Is Community News Just a "Nice-to-Have?"
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No surprise local, especially user-created local, isn't working
Posted by John Wilpers 6/18/2008 1:18:24 AM

It'd be one thing if we had really given local, user-created community content a fair test.

But if you look at how newspapers have treated local reader- or user-generated content, it's no surprise that traffic and participation have been underwhelming.

Editors bury it, and then they don't promote it. Many times it's on a site completely separate from the newspaper. What does THAT say?!

User-created or community content is rarely visible on a newspaper's home page (other than a cute "Your Stories; Your Photos" logo, usually accompanied by a ridiculously cute kitty), and it's almost never in the pages of the paper itself. That would be damn near sacrilegious!

Does it make sense to put all user content under one tab, like "Blogs" or "Your Content?" Can you imagine if editors treated their own content the way they treat user's content. There would only be two tabs at the top of the page: "Our Stuff" and "Your Stuff!"

The truly sad fact is that most major metropolitan dailies and many mid-sized dailies have yet to deign to let user content on their websites or into their papers.

So, until newspapers actually promote and put user stuff IN CONTEXT (sports in sports, entertainment in entertainment, news in news, etc.), it's pointless to even try to decide if reader-created content and community news is working or not.

Until then, it's like saying a fishing lure doesn't work after testing it in the bathtub.

I talk about this at greater length on my blog at johnwilpers.wordpress.com.

GATEKEEPERS
Posted by JAMES JOHNSON 6/17/2008 4:07:26 PM

Education restricts access to jobs by virtue of its gate-keeper function. The core function of education since 1980 is the elimination of job competition.

a little late but...
Posted by Tish Grier 6/17/2008 3:52:21 PM

Should have posted this bit of feedback the other day...but I'll add it now...because I disagree so much with Ken Sands:

From my involvement as community officer for Placeblogger.com I've got a ringside seat for what's going on with hyperlocal sites.

Now, a newspaper may not be able to generate lots of income from hyperlocal and may need to rely on the dreadded and oh so inferior "user generated content," but hyperlocal sites run on a small-scale, and depending on the economics of the region, can make decent, sustainable income. Some of they hyperlocal sites make good money thru ads, while some make it through a combination of ads and services or other jobs. But anyone who desires to run a hyperlocal site shouldn't quit his/her day job right away. It takes time to build an audience and gain acceptance in the community....

Whilch leads to the what model might work for hyperlocal. An EveryBlock model might work for a newspaper, and, if the people can get to that information, might actually stimulate lots of good conversation. That model, however, won't work for small, private-run hyperlocals, which usually focus on a town. The EveryBlock model in my small town of Easthampton, MA wouldn't work. Not enough businesses to trash ;-)

As for Loudon Extra--that was a huge community. In a community of that size there are tightly-knit sub-communities or subcultures. What Rob Curley didn't do, and said as much, is get out to try to establish a presence in the community. He had the power, and he could have rallied perhaps the Chamber of Commerce crowd as well as the Republican and Democratic factions. The other subcultures, like knitters or real estate agents, might have needed to be reached differently. The trouble is in thinking of that size of community as one huge mass under a municipal name. When, in fact, it's neighborhoods and communities of affinity within a larger civic body. It could have been done, but Curley wasn't the person to do it.

consumers, not citizens
Posted by Mary Durlak 6/13/2008 9:25:38 AM

A professor at the college I work at makes an argument that, through the first half of the 20th century, education's primary (not exclusive) purpose was to prepare people to be citizens. Since then, it's been to prepare people to become economic entities--consumers, producers, workers, professionals. If he's right, you'd expect to see less interest in community/public/civic affairs.

Participation will usually be rare
Posted by Larry Lynch 6/12/2008 8:29:34 PM

As someone who was raised practicing community journalism in a small town in the 1950s, I sense that community journalists who use web sites expect too much of their readers. They are busy. They are consumers not participants in news. They want you to figure out how to speak to them, to inform them about things they care about, to entertain them. If they have something to gain by participating, they will. Otherwise it�s unlikely. The best thing you can do is entertain them and try to keep them coming back. My parents� newspaper published columns of �country cousins� reports, which almost no one read except the people who lived in the rural community where the author was reporting who broke a leg, who took a vacation and who at Sunday dinner at what home. If you can get that personal, you might get more participation. In a sense, for those of you who read GalleyCat, that is what Ron does for the publishing industry in NewYork. But I am positive that most of us who want to know what�s happening in that world don�t contribute. There�s no value unless we are inside enough to add something useful.

Have you really thought about it?
Posted by Becky Blanton 6/12/2008 6:49:05 PM

Have you really thought about WHAT community news really is? This generation did not invent social networking. People stay in touch with each other regardless of whether or not there's a newspaper or a cool looking blog. They telephone each other. They see each other at church, during training at the rescue squad - where, in most small towns everyone is a second or third generation volunteer. They talk at school, in the grocery store, at work. NEWS goes on whether someone is making money off of selling ads over it or not.

And for as many of those who talk, more listen. For those of you who don't grasp the purpose of community news as anything other than a way to sell ads or generate revenue or create a "following" for yourself, I can't explain it in 2,000 characters. But no - it's not a "nice-to-have" kind of thing.

It's the fabric of a society. Local news is the way in which a community adjusts its views, morals and understanding of itself. Local news is the feedback people seek out in order to adjust their own behaviors and beliefs. It is a way in which people support or sanction members of the tribe. Even though the specific news may not interest us we still notice the response a story gets. We may not care about a specific mugging if we don't know the person but a part of us notices when we see there are an increasing number of muggings and where. Local news is about keeping a finger on the pulse of a community and what is or seems to be important to others around us. It's not always the specific facts that are critical - but the tone of voice, the person, the story, the outcome, the follow up. This doesn't do the topic justice but the fact is - local news IS important but you'll never understand that if you don't understand the deeper dynamics of human interaction. It's not about facts. It's about people. It's not a "niche" or a "demographic" it's about the flow and pulse of life in a community...it can't be reduced to revenue.

Amen
Posted by Mike Moore 6/12/2008 6:42:23 PM

Wow, I've just re-subscribed to this newsletter after a five-year stint almost exclusively in print, and it's great to hear someone put my thoughts more eloquently.

I've taken over our new-ish community sites and am dealing with the same things. I'll try to solicit posts on neighborhood topics and events, and invariably the response is "Slow news day?" Somehow we have to re-train readers that what they talk about on the corner is important enough to share online.

It's all part of the gap between what we're interested in and what we think we should be interested in. My generation (X) never got the memo that we're supposed to hang on the words of the county board which has some role I've yet to figure out. Somehow, in the back of our minds, we feel ashamed of this, but not enough to change.

But you've all apparently fought the wars that I'm just beginning, so I'll be interested to hear more from your perspective.

What is the point of community news?
Posted by Donica Mensing 6/12/2008 6:19:57 PM

Here's another way to think about the question (which is a very good one)...

If we think the purpose of community news/ journalism is to provide information then it will always have an element of passivity to it. For the most part it will remain in the category of "nice to know when I have time."

If journalism is produced in a way that helps people solve actual problems, do community work, and make a difference in their communities on issues that really matter to them -- then it could move into the "have to know" category.

If journalism is produced as a way to help people be smarter consumers, better lovers, and further other personal goals, it will appeal to those people with particular personal interests.

If we believe that journalism has a role in civic life, then it would make sense to conceptualize communities as publics -- as political entities that have an interest in taking collective action about public problems -- not just aggregate personal preferences, but organize actual public work to make where we live better. Yes, it's activism. But don't we want people to take action as a result of our journalism? Then we could make that mantra part of how we do what we do, rather than "cover" things hoping that someone somewhere will be motivated to respond in some way.

Once journalism becomes part of the fabric of action, it becomes integral to what people do as part of living their lives. It could move from "nice to know" to part of the rhythm of participation.

Understanding Robin Dunbar
Posted by Steve Yelvington 6/12/2008 6:01:54 PM

I've frequently used Robin Dunbar's number to explain hyperlocal to journalists who persist in looking at the world through a mass media lens. This is where I disagree with Ken Sands in the detail. If you're truly hyperlocal, then you're going to be personal, because the whole point is reflecting that circle of 150 or so people who are truly important to you.

But for some individuals, that circle may not actually include very many people who are geographically local. I know it's true in my own case. And I also know that's a bad thing -- bad for society, bad for government, and bad for local newspapers (hyper or not).

So I point to Robert Putnam's book, "Bowling Alone," and to the Saguaro Seminar's Better Together project. We can, and we should, do something about this problem.

I wrote about this last week in a blog item titled Hyperlocal lessons.

Ken nailed it
Posted by Steve Outing 6/12/2008 5:29:55 PM

Ken Sands: "People's interests are hyper-personal, not hyper-local." ... I think this is key. I've been saying for some time that sites like the defunct Backfence.com and (still-running) Yourhub.com contain boring content. That is, boring to everyone but a select few who know the kid who hit the game-winning home run, or the woman who won the local Volunteer of the Year award, or the guy who got bit by a dog.

I DO care if a guy a couple streets over in my neighborhood crashed his car or got arrested for indecent exposure; perhaps I know him, or pass him when walking the dog. I couldn't care less about the guy who lives in a neighborhood across town and won an award or got arrested for drunk driving.

Deliver me hpyer-personal news, not hyper-local. This really gets back to the old Daily Me concept. But now we have the technology to make that happen, and a growing well of this micro-local news from which to tap (local bloggers, websites of various local organizations, social network pages by local people, etc. -- as well as from the newspaper staff's reporting, of course).

I wrote a blog item today touching briefly on this:
http://steveouting.com/2008/06/11/dog-bites-man-is-news/

yes, it matters BUT
Posted by T Record 6/12/2008 5:09:09 PM

It has to be done well.

And frankly, you can't just put up a website and expect to have a ton of contributors. We talked about this to some degree at the Journalism That Matters/New Pamphleteers conference that I attended last week in Minneapolis. The most successful sites, like ours, are those founded by people who are the anchors of the site. And I don't mean anchors as in TV (my former field).

We welcome, and are thankful for, e-mails, forum postings, phone calls, text messages, tweets, etc., from folks in our community. But the bulk of what we report is news that we dig up. We watch government and development closely. We have developed a relationship with the local police precinct. We drive around to see what's going on. We go to every neighborhood-level meeting we possibly can. Lots going on, every day.

And our community has responded. We have very good numbers both in traffic and in ad revenue.

Elsewhere in our city, some folks are trying to find similar success by either putting up sites and saying "come blog for us" or else putting up sites that cut and paste stories from "old media" sources and call them "posts." Just doesn't work that way.

If you want to tell your community's stories, start telling them. If you provide a needed service, your neighbors and other community members will jump in and embrace it.

BTW, we had our site going for two years before we started selling ads, and for all that time, it was something we did in our spare (ha) time - working on it about 8 hours a day in addition to a 10-hour-a-day job. I would never dream of just starting a site and trying to get ad revenue from the very beginning. You have to establish yourself and your value first.

Now, we are lucky enough to "just' be able to work on our site, 18-some-odd hours a day (a couple fewer on weekends). I never take the community response for granted. If we stop serving them well today, they could all move on to something else tomorrow; I wouldn't blame 'em.

They're not lazy, just confused
Posted by Michelle Ferrier 6/12/2008 5:07:11 PM

Denise and Amy,
I've always called MyTopiaCafe.com the "good news" site or the "anti-news" site. We're about the conversations that people are having on their sidewalks, over their coffee, on their drive home from work on their mobiles. Getting people to understand that this is different from what mainstream media has cared about and that their individual story matters has been the biggest challenge to participation. They say, "I didn't think it was important," or "I didn't think you wanted that type of story." We've devalued the personal narrative and the personal experience for so long with our traditional news values that folks themselves have hesitations as to whether what they say is important anymore.

Part of what I do is educating people that sharing their story matters -- the death of my cat and how I'm dealing with it matters to someone in my hyperlocal world. And their stories matter to me.

And despite the belief that only Millenials or digital natives can do this stuff, statistics show that age groups from 13 on up -- my key demographic on MyTopiaCafe.com is ages 35-55 -- do participate in online communities...and they do so on MyTopiaCafe.com as well. They're not lazy or think it's not their job, they're often just confused...especially when their online community is part of their local "news" media organization. We've trained them well in believing that "news" is best left to the professionals. But I believe "stories" are best left to the people who experience them.

Bingo
Posted by Leigh Hanlon 6/12/2008 5:06:24 PM

<< People's interests are hyper-personal, not hyper-local. >>

I never thought of it that way, but Ken Sands is absolutely right.

NAAAH
Posted by JAMES JOHNSON 6/12/2008 2:09:38 PM

The problem is people arent bonded to their communities because 'home' is someplace else. Most of us are transients. In five years we'll be moved to another city somewhere.

Not only do these gypsies not have any interest in local news, they have no respect for local history or traditions. My hometown is at war because the gypsies are destroying the town to make it like 'back home.'

They're lazy
Posted by Denise Covert 6/12/2008 11:59:52 AM

I do believe that local and community news is important to readers. But assuming they don't care because they won't produce it themselves misses the point.

People love TV. Some people REALLY love TV. But if there is no TV, or the channels aren't giving them what they want, very very few people would actually go out, write a script, get a camera and actors, and shoot their own TV show. They would just move on and do something else, like they did during the writers strike.

Community news is important. But we can't expect to outsource it to citizens. Not just yet anyway. Right now, the people best able to be citizen journalists, the ones who are most comfortable with the technology and blogging, etc., are the youngest consumers of media, teens and Millennials. And they do disseminate their info -- to a specific, closed network like MySpace or Facebook.

The people who really value community news, the ones who want to show off their dog or their son's Little League home run, are these kids' parents, the boomers and older GenXers, and they are still of the culture that journalists gather the news, and they consume it. It may take a generation in order to get them to change that thinking, but for now, relying on reader submissions to populate community news sites is like asking viewers to create their own TV shows. They are just too lazy to do it. No slam against them; it's just "not their job."

News is personal, which is NOT the same as local
Posted by Ken Sands 6/12/2008 11:42:52 AM

Thank you, Amy, for having the guts to state the obvious.
I agree with most of what's said here, but would add this:

1) People's interests are hyper-personal, not hyper-local. I care about the Oregon Ducks and my son's college experience at Washington State University, and the REI trail maintenance project last weekend in McLean, Va., and real estate prices in the D.C. area, and whether there has been any crime in my snooty-rich Northwest D.C. neighborhood (not likely), and whether D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty are doing enough for me to want to keep my first-grade daughter in D.C. public schools. Hardly any of that would be considered hyper-local. My news is individualized and it's not local. Facebook is far more useful (though not perfect by any means), than any hyper-local news site I've ever seen.

2) So far, there is no evidence of a sustainable business model for a web-only, hyper-local site. Because it's hyper-local, you can't afford to pay for content, since the revenue is so low. So you have to rely on the mythical "user-generated content."

3) If there is a sustainable model, it will be based on the kinds of data being generated in EveryBlock sites, not on user-generated content.

I was thinking about all of this in relation to the Loudoun County experiment over at the Washington Post.

I have tremendous respect for Rob Curley, but think the Loudoun experiment was doomed to mediocrity from the beginning. How can a rapidly growing and sprawling region of 200,000 people be considered a "community" in any real sense?

Yet that slice of Virginia represents only a fraction of the Post's readership area. Is it even possible for the revenue from such a micro-site pay for the salaries of all the journalists involved in putting it together?

"Skepticism" is the Watchword
Posted by Mac Slocum 6/12/2008 11:37:24 AM

Whether we're discussing citizen journalism, hyperlocal media, community, etc., there's a broader point here that needs to be addressed -- any initiative, regardless of its size or potential impact, needs to be *critically examined* from multiple perspectives. There needs to be some level of justification -- even if it's minute -- for all stakeholders, including the most important stakeholder of all: the audience.

Community news is like environmentalism -- when asked directly, everyone says they're "pro environment," but how many of these people recycle regularly, let alone engage in truly green initiatives?

It's common for people in any industry to overestimate the importance of what they do (or what they enjoy), but when you're engaged in a project that aims to connect to broad bases of people, I think it's vital to step back and critically ask: Do people actually care about this?

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