Ever Hyper, Will New Yorkers Embrace Hyper-Local News?

(MoneyWatch)  That, my friend, is the question.

This week brought us more exciting developments in the hyper-local space, one of Doctor Weir's main prescriptions for saving the news business.

First, some context:

As we reported in January, The New York Times teamed up with Every Block, and NBC partnered with Outside In. Both of these MSM companies are exploring how to leverage their reporting resources by exploiting geo-coding, the popularity of mobile devices, and the abundance of various forms of user-generated content (UGC), as gathered by their start-up partners, in order to extend their coverage much deeper into New York neighborhoods.

The beauty is they may discover a new business model in the process.

This week, the Times launched a new hyper-local initiative, called The Local, in two communities, Brooklyn and a chunk of suburban New Jersey, that rely on a single professional journalist to essentially curate the blogs and other UGC supplied by a networks of enthusiastic local citizen journalists.

Simultaneously, NBC announced New York Nonstop, a 24-7 news channel, based again on professional journalists overseeing and organizing UGC, this time in video form.

I straight-out love this model of blending the best of old and new media. Good journalists can be excellent teachers, when given the opportunity, and both the Times and NBC will still have a ton of good journalists, for a little while longer. But there is an order of magnitude army of more people throughout each community journalists cover who know what is going on around them in ways that no journalist can ever replicate.

Now, there is a very brief window of opportunity for the grand canyon separating MSM and the citizenry to finally be closed, but only if both sides most quickly.

Along with the exciting new content strategies like the ones described above, we desperately need much more creative advertising and sponsorship initiatives, possibly even new subscription options, that will help finance these innovations and produce revenue streams to everyone involved -- the publisher, the journalist, and yes, the blogger.

The key, in my view, is recognizing the potential multiples embedded in the qualified audience niches that will implicitly acrete aound these hyper-local content nodes. In order to monetize this traffic, companies like the Times and NBC need to immediately repurpose their ad sales teams, flipping assumptions that give more weight to national or regional advertisers in favor of hyper-local advertisers.

The establishments that can attract more business from those who can walk or bike to their storefronts ought to be the new targets for ad sales teams. Those companies who really want to improve their brand in certain zip codes are targets for lucrative sponsorships.

Finally, and somewhat ironically, many of those citizen posters who end up getting validated by the new hyper-local publishing model would love nothing more than having their work republished in the old-fashioned way, on dead trees, at least over the near term. Their families and friends and neighbors would also enjoy seeing the text, photo, audio, video, and other media products they create, if only because when it comes to media, like politics, to paraphrase Tip O'Neill's Dad, "All news is local."