You can’t get more “hyperlocal” than a newspaper serving a population of 1000. This is the purest attempt at Hyperlocal that I’ve ever read about, a very small operation covering a very small population. It has been said before that hyperlocal fails because the advertising cannot support it. So what happened in this situation? Something new and unexpected? Nope, from publisher Mitch Traphagen, “It literally came to an end, the ad revenues,”.
The East Iowa Herald Closes After One Year -from AP/ Chicago Tribune.
It should be pretty obvious by now that advertising revenues cannot support general interest news operations by now. The Krugman Paradox and Publisher’s Dilemma spell this out pretty clearly.
What about donations? What about Spot.us? Barring a generous grant or donation, this model will also fail. Spot.us might be a nice niche alternative for the San Francisco Bay area, but I don’t see the model working for small-town USA. There just isn’t enough disposable income floating around for the model to work.
What’s the way ahead? In the Chicago Tribune story, Mr. Traphagen mentions that companies in his area are not advertising because they aren’t selling, so they can’t afford to buy ads. That’s most certainly the case everywhere in the country right now. So how can people like Mr. Traphagen help these businesses while also publishing town news?
- Before a newspaper has any aspirations of writing Pulitzer worthy articles, figure out where the money to support such a business is going to come from. In this case, I would advise Mr. Traphagen to get extremely well acquainted with the businesses in his area and find out what their needs are. He should be asking, “How can I help you make money?” I’m not saying he didn’t attempt this, but he needed to make it his priority, not news reporting.
- Listen to what the businesses want and then exceed their expectations. In the Internet paradigm, this usually means better online exposure and branding. When I meet with business owners from my local chamber of commerce, many times, I educate them on all the free and inexpensive ways they can extend their brands online. They find this the most helpful of all my advice. They already know about newspapers, and fliers, and town shoppers, blah blah blah…
- As the publisher, enlist volunteers to do what you can’t do or don’t know what to do. If a local business wants you to help them with their web presence but you yourself don’t know how to go about this, seek out “interns” from local community colleges or even high schools. The same can be done with gathering news content. In any case, the point is to keep costs extremely low. This is extremely important, this is how the Internet works: ridiculously low costs + economies of scale = online success.
- Once an economically sustainable revenue stream has been established, NOW figure out how to use some of the income to create a news publication (print or online).
These are tough economic times for everyone, news organizations’ problems are compounded by the Internet paradigm shift. Businesses and individuals wishing to succeed in this new paradigm must fundamentally change the way they add value to their community.
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