What I want from my local newspaper (and how I want it):
Little League (text messages), church carnivals (database), downtown characters (multimedia), car washes (video), profiles of people who cook my food and wash my vegetables (multimedia), neighborhood business owners (podcast), garage sales (map), changes in local and state laws (database), local school activities (calendar), local politics (blog), local natural beauty (slideshow), school lunch menus (database), localization of national issues (enterprise stories, databases, multimedia).
How much of the above can be covered by a community news site? Most of it, really, with some help from a news organization’s reporters, especially the multimedia shooters and database jockeys.
Kevin Anderson asks: “How much ‘lived experience’ does your news site cover?”
The answer? Usually a resounding ‘not enough.’
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Comments
9 responses to “Hyperlocal doesn’t mean being obsessive about every breath your city council takes”
[…] Hyperlocal doesn’t mean being obsessive about every breath your city council takes. Ryan Sholin provides a veritable checklist for anyone interested in covering a community. There’s a lot more to his post than that, of course. And follow the link to Kevin Anderson’s post on defining news. […]
This is a great point on two fronts.
1. The key to success with niche markets is to serve the niche. 2. People dig people.
We can put the people back in the news- not just the tragedy and pain – but the humanity. Local reporting is a vehicle to unite a community – not just inform and make paranoid. Local blogs and news sites can use new media to expand the familiar, dissolve modern fences between neighbors, and inform for social action. There is plenty of ‘the sky is falling’ on the national sites.
[…] to Comments Ryan said in his blog Invisible Inkling: Hyperlocal doesn’t mean being obsessive about every breath your city council takes. What I want […]
[…] clipped from http://www.ryansholin.com […]
If what you desire is lived experience, how can we kill “sound off”?
[…] Hyperlocal doesn’t mean being obsessive about every breath your city council takes Some ideas on what information people might want from a local newspaper (and how they want to digest it.) I would add housing transactions to that list. (tags: web news paper journalism idea) […]
[…] Here’s an answer: […]
[…] somewhere else. Get over it. CNN and ESPN are not new, and nytimes.com wasn’t far behind. Write local. There are plenty of cooks and painters and poets in your neighborhood. Go out and meet […]
[…] Ryan Sholin offers some innovative tips for how information can be delivered within the structure of current newsrooms on a variety of different platforms. […]