Inside the hyperlocal multimedia ‘nerdery’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 20 October 2006 at 10:54
Tags: Journalism

The Naples Daily News in Florida (circ 103,000) has one of the most respected online operations of any American local paper. One reason behind that reputation is its former head of new media Rob Curley, who is profiled today in Fast Company.

Curley recently joined Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive as Vice President of Product Development. His advice for “hyperlocal” multimedia content for relatively small, local papers goes something like this:

• “Master the obvious” — create in-depth coverage of local topics that matter both your local community and the wider world, like local literary heros or sports teams with a wider following.
• Master “small-J journalism”: Don’t compete with CNN; instead, cover the local stories that “rarely make headlines but loom large in local life”, like local children’s sports teams. To translate a baseball analogy used in the piece, cover the under-10s football like it’s Manchester United.
• Compete with local broadcasters by offering local news podcasts and vodcasts.
• Create online offerings, seperate from a newspaper’s main companion site, that are targeted at younger readers.

All of this only works best when a paper gives a multimedia team the space it needs to experiment with innovative new products. To be “fearless, driven and playful.” Here’s what this means in Naples:

Across the parking lot from the Daily News newsroom, the new-media department is a hectic and cluttered cross between a startup and a college paper. There’s a large-screen TV, XBox console, restrooms labeled women.com and men.com, a kitchen that doubles as a podcast studio, and a dark couch that gets plenty of use. The small fridge in the corner, stocked with Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and other sodas, empties fast. “Informal” doesn’t do it justice; site manager Levi Chronister pads around the office in shorts and bare feet.

Welcome to the nerdery. It’s not hard to imagine that in five years, this is what a newsroom will look like.

But Fast Company warns that Curley’s approach may not work at larger newspapers that need to cover national and international news and can’t dedicate resources to covering the “hyperlocal”.

Multimedia publishing in a integrated newsroom, Curley says, is “about working differently, not necessarily more”. But in an observation that may resonate at the Telegraph these days, Fast Company notes “that’s sure to be a hard sell at union papers, where the question of expanding job responsibilities is not insignificant.”

Tags: Journalism