There are a number of voices asserting that the saving grace for local news will be a transition from the merely local to the hyperlocal. In its most intriguing form, hyperlocal journalism calls for embedded reporters in a market’s key neighborhoods. The idea is that this will allow an organization to cover those stories that most often go unreported. Neighborhood reporters could attend the PTA meetings, the high school sporting events, neighborhood organizations, town council meetings, craft shows, and even, I suppose, block parties.
Of course, a presupposition of a hyperlocal model assumes the Web as publishing platform. After all, this volume of limited appeal news lends itself only to the limitless expressions of the Internet. You can’t stack a 30 minute show with PTA meetings, and there just isn’t enough room in any city’s daily for a story about every craft show. Even if you could, you wouldn’t. The mass appeal just isn’t there. But, of course, hyperlocal journalism isn’t at all about mass appeal. It’s about the Long Tail. The niche audiences that stretch out across the bottom of your Web stats graph, that, taken together, may very well bring you more eyeballs than your mainstream content. At least, that’s the plan.
The problem with hyperlocal news gathering, though, is that it fails to focus on what really drives consumption of the product. Beyond the thrill of spectacle, the crime, accident and fire stories, celebrity gossip or the just plain bizarre, are those stories that are interesting to the consumer because they address an aspect of his life that has lent towards a definition of self. Just because a story is hyperlocal to a reader or viewer, just because a story covers the PTA meeting held in his next door neighbor’s living room, doesn’t mean he’ll find it interesting; and yet, a school administrator in another state whose own district is struggling with some of the same issues covered in a PTA story would most likely find the content compelling.
A hyperpersonal story isn’t at all locale dependent, though locale can certainly be a contributing factor in giving a story hyperpersonal appeal. And that’s the challenge before the evolving local newsroom: To find those local niches that can generate hyperpersonal content. If this sounds a lot like beat reporting, that’s because it is. But where you might currently have an education beat, hyperpersonal journalism calls for the category to be explored for niches within the niche. That doesn’t mean a beat for each school district within your demo. That would still be hyperlocal coverage. It rather means exploring education for those viable sub-niches that engage the consumer’s “I am.” Consumer expressions like “I am a member of the marching band,” “I am the parent of a high school football player,” or “I am a teacher” allow us to quickly see how the education beat can be extrapolated into the hyperpersonal.
Of course, local media outlets don’t have the staff for hyperpersonal journalism. It wouldn’t be fiscally feasible to even attempt it on anything but the smallest scale with inhouse talent anyway. Instead, embracing a hyperpersonal model means searching out other voices in your market to begin contributing to the news conversation. Start by identifying a space that your competition isn’t in. Find those who are already blogging the niches within the niche or those who at least have the interest and drive to begin contributing content. Then provide them with a platform to not only publish their content, either directly or through aggregation, but to form communities with others who share the same hyperpersonal connections.
Going forward, those news organizations that become facilitators of the conversation instead of its gatekeepers are most likely to have a continued voice in it.
