As more and more local newsrooms embrace social media as marketing and distribution channels, it becomes increasingly easier to catalog our missteps into the space. Microblogging site Twitter, in particular, has been susceptible to misuses by our industry. Lost Remote pointed out Chron.com’s poor use of Twitter in pushing truncated headlines during Hurricane Gustav, and a Colorado newspaper’s decision to twitter a three-year-old boy’s funeral garnered them a number of slaps on the wrist from even the national press. While there are bound to be some of these missteps, they’re far from unavoidable. To that end, I’ve tried to outline some basic concepts and concrete steps that will help your newsroom better leverage its Twitter presence and, hopefully, without repeating some of the mistakes of our colleagues.

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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.

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