Markets

All News is Local in the Global Village

By David Weir

Updated on: September 30, 2008 / 7:01 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

We've looked at Topix and we've looked at EveryBlock. We've examined the efforts by the Hartford Courant, among others. Tomorrow, we'll look at another hyper-local news resource, called Outside:In.

But today, I want to establish from the perspective of a media executive the business rationale for this kind of approach to reporting the news.

First, this is a sustainable way of acquiring and integrating user-generated content with the rest of your reportage.
Second, neighbors have an insatiable curiosity about what is going on with all the people living around them.
Third, everybody benefits from the latest crime, property, tax and public record information available for their little piece of this earth.
Fourth, you never run out of hyper-local news. There simply is no such thing as a "slow news day."
Fifth, in m definition, "hyper-local" does not mean parochial. We are living in an unprecedented age of globalization. People living within a block of me hail from Korea, Vietnam, Japan, China, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Mexico, Somalia, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, France, Italy, the U.K., Russia, Poland, Morocco, and Kansas, among other foreign countries. They remain closely tied with their home countries, and so is the news they generate and consume.
Sixth, we have the technology to put this all together.

Today, courtesy of EveryBlock, I was sorting through the residential parking permits issued by the city in my end of town. Pretty boring stuff, you might say, except if you are wondering why it is getting harder to park around here lately, and what all the new construction of condos might have to do with that.

On Topix, I checked out a local interview of Madonna, who just turned 50 and who, like me, grew up in Bay City, Michigan.

The links are endless between what is happening down your block and the most distant place on earth. Bloggers are everywhere, as are those posting to Flickr, Yelp, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and tons of lesser known social networking sites. The point for media execs is to use our traditional skills as newspeople to exploit these new opportunities to provide an integrated platform of public records, UGC, and good, old-fashioned journalism to reinvent our companies as the most exciting information sources they can be.