3 comments

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  kob

  12 months ago

  good post; I think you defined the issue well. On the issue of localism ....
  
  It is difficult to measure but neighborhood blogs are growing readers.
  
  In regard to this point: "Increased Competition and Choice are the Real Localism Killers"
  
  There isn't that much competition. The number of neighborhood blogs is small, but growing rapidly.
  
  Much of the dicussion is about saving newspapers and connecting newspapers with readers. Newspapers are irrelevant. The expertise, news gathering and editing that newspapers have developed is all open source and easily transferable, and that's what is going on. That knowledge is moving out of newsrooms and into the communities.
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  Richard Hobson

  12 months ago

  Great post. I'd just like to add to the previous comment; I think one thing that local media consumers need is a specific personal and community context which creates value over and above that which they can get from everyday social interactions within the community.
  
  I live in a town (Oxford, UK) which has very active local community groups. Each group has its own web site and the news on those sites is hyperlocal down to street level. They still get traffic becasue the issues they deal with have a very personal local context for the local residents. These things don't get covered elsewhere. Typical content will be about representations that a community group has made to the local council. They are basically a feeback mechanism.
  
  I am also working on my own hyper-local trading project and I am learning that success with that is very much about building a local context for the content and generating personal as well as community value.
  
  Here's the point I think I'm getting to. At the hyper-local level, the viral, popularist,broad brush social media models start to break down. Local neighbours don't need Facebook/MySpace et al to communicate becuase they see each other regularly in the street or in church or at the PTA. They have a real world context in which they are already socially networked.
  
  To win this crowd and generate value at a community level you must engage with existing community groups and generate value over and above what they can achieve through normal everyday social interaction.
  
  To generate commercial value, you must tap into the value drivers that exist within those community networks and act as an enabler. There's a lot of competition here and the crowd is fickle. Being successful is hardwork and requires a lot more than a simple "invite my friends" tool.
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  norman ball

  4 months ago

  Localism is the glue of societal coherence. We must talk amongst ourselves and thwart the top-down command structure format of media mogol-dom.
  
  "Fanning the Embers of Localism":
  
  http://n.b5z.net/i/u/10009435/i/Localism.pdf
  
  The DTV Transition: A Localism Perspective:
  
  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3709631...
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