Keep the faith.

Polly

http://www.theloopny.com

I respectfully disagree on a specific point: There is no alternative to corporate news chains if one is concerned about national and international news.

Arguably, readers are concerned about both, what happened at the local city council and school board meetings and what happened in Washington D.C. and U.S. international relations.

Hyperlocal has its place. The monetization of the hyperlocal interest appears to be the crux of the argument over AOL’s approach via Patch. Since no one has articulated AOL’s specific business model, outside of conjecture and innuendo, it’s premature to conclude at this juncture the top-down approach won’t work.

The business of media has long escaped journalists who have been the tools in the business model’s toolkit. Today, the smart money is on entrepreneur-minded journalists. But when we put together our business plans, we better remain cognizant of the corporate competitor whose business model we’ve yet to figure out … even as we seek to figure out our own.

The bottom line is journalists are new to this business game, despite our storytelling skills. And I might remind everyone that it was journalists laughing at bloggers early on and now crying foul on the success of the Huffington Post … while ignoring the vast landscape filled with HuffPo imitators, many of whom are doing quite well amid massive corporate media layoffs impacting the elite-minded journalists who scoff at the new business models that have lowered barriers to entry.

It’s a new frontier with many opportunities for both the small guy and the big guy. I wouldn’t count anyone out at this point. It’s way too early.

I just don’t know what to say. Frankly I’m speechless at this point. This isn’t a slight against Shafer so much as a general comment on the state of debate.

Case: Not only is the conversation about what local media needs to be far off base (this article and its comments are pretty consistent with the overall conversation, the FCC report being as guilty as any), what’s worst is that it seems we can’t tell the difference between the new McClatchy of Local (that’s Patch) and the new dawn of the weekly local newspaper (that’s many of the “hyberlocal” sites talked about.)

It’s a fairly 1:1 conversion of print-to-web models.

If we can’t even see through that smoke screen, how far are we from the real conversations about what needs to happen?

Hint: Efficiency, and death of the mega-publications blocking the sunlight from the forest floor.

According to an NAA study done between 2004 and 2007, a typical newspaper will reach around 32 percent of online readers in a given area in a given month. Each reader (UV) will visit about seven or eight times per month and view slightly more than five pages, on average, each visit.

Patch’s numbers show a different pattern. In general, the reach count is good. A typical Patch site in a given month has UV counts equal to about 41 percent of the local population. What’s not so good is that a typical reader visits a Patch site less than two times per month and views, on average, fewer than two pages. And those last numbers don’t seem to vary much from one Patch site to another in the Southern California sample. Nor do those numbers seem to vary much depending on whether the site has been around for a year or only a few months. The relative size of the community also seems to not be much of a factor.

What this seems to indicate is that although Patch has been able to generate awareness of itself within each site’s local community, it hasn’t been able to generate much engagement.

The local newspapers of the previous century also didn’t scale. What occurred was that local entrepreneurs created one or a handful of papers. Then Gannett, Newhouse and others came and wrapped them into big, national networks. The same thing might happen with local sites, but that could be well in the future.

I wrote about this for Nieman Lab shortly after the AOL/HuffPo acquisition: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/02/lance-knobel-for-hyperlocal-news-we-local-players-will-have-the-edge/