News values in hyperlocal journalism

Posted by Martin Stabe on 8 November 2007 at 10:50
Tags: Outside.in, geotagging, hyperlocal, localisation, personalisation

In hyperlocal news, one reader’s banality is another’s vital intelligence.

Writing on the first anniversary of his geotagging and hyperlocal news project Outside.in, Steven Berlin Johnson provides a great annecdote about how hyperlocal news coupled with geotagging can create enormous value for readers, even where individual pieces of information available may seem trivial to users who live just a little bit further away.

In the course of some maintainance work, a friend discovered that the foundation of their 19th-century house was compromised. After some emergency work an engineer advised that the building temporarily stabilized — assuming that there were no abnormal vibrations or earthquakes in the vicinity. A few months later, the owner of the house heard through neighbourhood gossip that the city was about to stard a major sewage pipe replacement project on their street — a jackhammer-intensive process that would have resulted in “abnormal vibrations” for weeks.

“What I think is so instructive in this sequence of events is the news value of that information about the city’s construction plans for the street,” Johnson writes.

“For my friends, that little nugget of information was arguably the single most vital headline they could have possibly read that week, far more important than anything going on in Iraq, or in the U.S. campaign season, much less in Britney Spears’ custody battle,” he adds.

The problem for hyperlocal news sites, Johnson continues, is the “Pothole Paradox” — street repairs on your own road are interesting to you, but “news about a pothole repair just five blocks from your street is the least interesting thing you could possibly imagine.”

The whole essay is worth reading for anyone interested in the importance of news personalisation and localisation.

Tags: Outside.in, geotagging, hyperlocal, localisation, personalisation