Comments on: It's a lo-o-o-ong way from Lawrence, Kan., to Loudoun County, Va.

By: 71.191.173.191

71.191.173.191 — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:07:23 +0000

Here’s some more commentary, from ground-zero in Loudoun County, specifically the “Dulles South” area (another region identified by the residents of Loudoun, but not by LoudounExtra)…

http://www.dullessouthonline.com/loudoun_county_gateway/2008/06/loudoun-extra-welcome-to-neighborhood.html

By: John Wilpers

John Wilpers — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:36:50 +0000

Hi, Tom!

It’s been a long time since our days together at AOL Digital City! Now THAT was an adventure of the Lewis Carroll variety.

I completely agree with your analysis of Loudoun Extra. As Curley himself admits, too much glitz, too little ground-level contact and content.

When they launched I was dismayed that they didn’t seem to want to include local bloggers, vloggers and podcasters. I just did a one-day unscientific look at the numbers of local video blogs posted in newspapers’ cities every day and it’s huge (see my blog).

It’s beyond me why local editors don’t take advantage of great local content that also has the effect of pulling those local content creators and their friends into the website and the paper (if the editors excerpt content into the print products).

At BostonNOW, I got 500 local bloggers to post on our site by including their posts on the theme-appropriate pages of our website AND on the theme-appropriate pages of the newspaper. We had Web denizens who never had a newspaper habit picking up the paper because we were publishing information by and about folks like them.

Anyway, it was good to “see” you again via your post. And it was good to “hear” your trademark critical thinking once again!

John

By: Tom Grubisich

Tom Grubisich — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:56:02 +0000

Tim, the lede graf of the story we’re talking about says the face-off at the Virginia Supreme Court was “the climax in a two-year legal battle over the county’s plans to build a high school just north of the town.” But actually the climax will come in three months, when the court makes its decision. The face-off produced no news. It could have been handled with a one-graf box on the homepage that included links to your earlier stories about the high school battle — when there was some real news happening.

By: Tim Richardson

Tim Richardson — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:29:45 +0000

Tom,

I must respectfully disagree with your criticism of our lead story on this day.

I have worked with Rob for eight years and was part of the team that developed LoudounExtra.com. I also decided this story would lead our site on this particular day. This decision was about as easy as they come.

In my opinion, when an important local story in your community makes it all the way to the highest court in the commonwealth, that’s a big story. You quoted the second paragraph of the story, which mentions that a decision isn’t expected until mid-September. But here’s the lead

By: Tom Grubisich

Tom Grubisich — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:39:25 +0000

Tish, you’re right — people won’t come just because you build the site. In talking about how to get beyond this gap, I should have been clearer that editors/impresarios have to do some content seeding. Creating a format (with strong promotional values) that encourages people to post an article or comment saying what they love and hate about their community is absolutely necessary. Paying the most prolific contributors may be just as necessary.

By: Steve Crozier

Steve Crozier — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 10:16:51 +0000

To Tom’s point about paying contributors, we pay most of our contributors. The only ones we don’t pay are those occasional contributors who are sending a story about their daughter’s softball game. Typically, seeing their child’s photo on the site is all the payment they need or want.

By: 71.107.63.59

71.107.63.59 — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:40:45 +0000

Good analysis. I think the truth is that hyperlocal is not a flashy enterprise. You have to be there and care about the small stuff. Your opportunity to turn the world upsidedown and win Pulitzers is limited. To big city eyes, you often look like an organ of the chamber of commerce, because business news is personal, not theoretical. You have responsibility for soccer scores and obituaries and bakeoffs and changing seasons. You ought to live there. Every once in a while, you find yourself taking the lead in a divisive issue, making enemies, publishing what most of your readers don’t want to hear, and committing journalism. I think I just described a decent weekly newspaper in the old days.

Online publishing such a product is 10,000 times easier, and with interactive comment online ought to be indispensible to the local community. Being the editor isnt any easier. Finding such an editor is like recruiting the brighest lights of Harvard med school to return to their home town and practice family medicine. My hat’s off the the Post for trying, and I doubt they’ll give up.

By: Tish Grier

Tish Grier — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:44:46 +0000

Tom…your piece talks about how to construct a site to get people involved. But the one thing you don’t talk about–and what Curley admitted to–was a lack of people-involvement in the site. Getting people to participate isn’t a matter of “if you build it, they will come,” but rather you build it, you get out there and talk to people, and then they come in and participate. If there’s no face to face presence within a community, there won’t be much of a online community.

By: Steve Crozier

Steve Crozier — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:35:14 +0000

I chuckle every time I read about one of these high-profile failures and the attendant analysis. No, we’re not big enough to be on the radar yet, but we have learned some things that even the big boys haven’t.

We publish truly hyperlocal news and information (e.g. http://lakewood-now.net). (Our smallest publication covers just 700 homes). It’s almost all “little j”–how could it be anything else. Pegasus happens to be in our back yard, and they’ve taken exactly the opposite approach: they cover a *very* large area pretty thinly, and they’ve done some things (political coverage and entertainment come to mind) really well.

In contrast, we use a “real” editor, but our writing and photography staff is made up of lots of local part-timers, retirees, stay-at-home moms, etc. Is it working? In an editorial area that covers 4400 homes, we have over 4500 unique readers monthly.

Grubisich has it right again. You have to really be committed to local. Not 6-month-old articles. And the business link is crucial too. We’re about launch a bounce-back program that engages local businesses in the community action as well.

Hyperlocal is dead. Long live hyperlocal.

By: Sarah Corbitt

Sarah Corbitt — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:16:52 +0000

I think what we are doing with Wicked Local deserves some investigation. We have a network of 158 local websites – an entire website devoted to a community, no matter how small,not just a homepage. Some of our communities are cities of 86,000 people, some have as few as 5,000 residents. We have impassioned interaction with our viewers – check out the comments on our stories. And we just launched our People section, where folks can post photos, events and talk to one another.
http://www.home.wickedlocal.com is our aggregate site where you can access all the rest of our sites. Wicked Local.com is a blog where we highlight interesting, important or quirky stories from our sites, directing the readers back to the local site.

I’d be interested to hear what people think in the light of this discussion.