Monday, February 08, 2010

Relevence and proximity in hyperlocal news

I'm heading later today to the future of news discussion down in Birmingham and I note that one of the participants will be Alex Gamela.


Alex is responsible for the HashBrum hyperlocal site has been writing a series of posts about building a hyperlocal website.

Here is his rational behind them

Why are hyperlocal news websites important? Why do people feel inclined to “backyard news”? Precisely. Proximity is the keyword here, and it’s not only a geographical concept, it’s also about the relationships that a hyperlocal blogger/journalist must have with the community (s)he covers. You have to live there, be a part of it, like Will Perrin said. You’ll beat any other local newspaper because of your knowledge, you know the ground better than them, the real problems, because they are your problems too. And since you are there, you can get to the news faster, and stay on them for a longer period of time, without deadline constraints: you have availability. And will the local media send a reporter for every story you find interesting? Not really, no. Your broken streetlight is not an issue for the general audience, but it is for the people who live in that street: granularity, or , it’s the small stuff that counts.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Easily I agree but I contemplate the collection should have more info then it has.