Media, Online, Print

Local media is in trouble, but only from a certain point of view

Alana Semuels at The Atlantic paints a somewhat grim picture for professional local – or what we used to call “hyper-local” media. The story is pretty much what you would expect given the last few years in the media world: Layoffs of staff at local outlets, big companies unwilling to invest in resources and entrepreneurs having trouble getting funding for their passion projects. It’s enough to make you pretty discouraged that the local online media market has any hope in a world where Buzzfeed and its ilk are dominating the social publishing space. And big time failures like Patch and others aren’t helping.

Obi-Wan-KenobiBut here’s a radical thought: Maybe the reality is that no, there’s no money in local media. And maybe that’s alright.

Travel back with me now to 15 some years ago when blogging was just starting to reach the mainstream. One of the first areas of promise identified by media watchers at the time was hyper-local. While news organizations of all sizes (at the time) had local reporters, self-publishing by the masses – by the people in the neighborhood – seemed like a great idea. Every problem could be solved by these independent voices who would shine a public light on them. These people knew the community and weren’t beholden to column inches and other considerations, so they could cover a topic as much as they deemed fit. And business models weren’t important because people would either do it just for their love of the community or, if they needed a few bucks they could always rely on Google AdSense income.

That utopia has only kinda sorta come to pass, though. Or at least the vision got altered in some way. It’s not necessarily that it never came to pass – I’m guessing you can find a decent personal blog for most major towns and villages in the U.S. – but it got subsumed by the larger media companies who thought they could operate these kinds of sites at scale and bring in not just the few dollars AdSense might generate but serious income through local advertising. Most of these operations are now over and done with, having failed through some combination of crappy content generated by lousy writers being paid a pittance and the inability to actually sell local advertising, a result of not having locally-based sales teams.

It’s possible, though, that local news coverage of the kind we’re talking about here will never be a viable business, either as a stand-alone enterprise or as a division of a larger company. But there’s nothing that says in order to succeed a hyper-local news blog needs to be generating massive revenue, be flush with investment cash or be part of a larger media company. They *can* be sure, but they don’t need to be.

I think the expectation that in order to be successful it needs to meet one or more of the above criteria is false and is simply a construct of the larger media-industry narrative. In a good story the money goes somewhere. So if it’s not being funneled through one of those filters then (sad trombone noise) it’s a failure. But it’s only a failure if there’s some sort of goal to make Aurora East Side News (which I should really start) into a going concern that allows me to quit my day job and become a full time journalist of some sort. If I’m doing Aurora East Side News (which I should really start) simply as a passion project because I want to raise awareness of certain things and am able to do so around the other commitments in my life, then whether I get 35 or 3,500 visitors a day it doesn’t really matter. Certainly a little check is nice and welcome, but it’s not the goal. The news is the goal.

19th Ward News, a site by Scott Smith about his neighborhood (which he says is taking a break while he migrates from Tumblr to WordPress) is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Nothing about this screams “I’m angling for a Knight Foundation Grant so I can retire.” Instead it looks like someone who just wants to talk about the good, bad and weird side of their neighborhood. It’s done for the love of community – physical community – conversation and information. That’s the kind of goal many of us started out with and it’s just as worthy an aspiration as someone who thinks their blog about movie marketing is going to land them a full time gig writing for Variety.

So it’s not that the goals need to change: Let people do what they want to do for whatever reason they want to do it. It’s that the perception of the worthiness of those goals in the eyes of industry watchers and commentators – myself included to an extent – need to be adjusted so that every venture *needs* to be about what the commentator thinks it needs to be about.

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