August 2010

Hyperlocal journalism: print’s hyperlink to new-age challenge

Dr Navneet Anand
Former journalist & media commenter

Sumana Khan
Former journalist

In his book ‘The Vanishing Newspaper’ Philip Meyer had prophesised, and interestingly very pointedly, that by first quarter of the year 2043 newspaper would die in America when ‘the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.’ We may yet be remotely away from that possibility but the scare does lead to a loud reminder: newspapers are beginning to lose ground beneath and very rapidly so. One of the foremost reasons for this shrinking story has been the rapidly evolving internet and newspapers have been acutely aware of it. They have been devising tools and strategies to challenge the threat of the internet and the rise of hyperlocal journalism has been one of the loudest manifestations of it.

As the term implies, hyperlocal journalism refers to the act of collecting and publishing stories which are extremely local in nature and in the conventional form of the profession would be dubbed as trivial. What’s fascinating, and worth critical pondering, is that even the biggest of them all including New York Times and Washington Post are resorting to it.

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You and news
Citizen journalism and hyperlocal news-a symbiotic relationship

Sethu Subramanian

YouThe author works as a mainframes programmer in Chennai for an investment firm
Compared to reading about the election results in UK, wouldn’t you be more interested to read about a function that was hosted in the school you studied ten years ago? And wouldn’t it be more exciting to read an article written by your neighbourhood friend about the skit that happened yesterday in an auditorium two streets away? Welcome to the world of citizen journalism and hyperlocal news.

The rise of citizen journalism

With a plethora of news channels cropping up in the last few years in India, channels tried to come up with innovations to score points over their rivals. One of those innovations was citizen journalism; introduced in the hope of getting a fresh perspective on interesting news stories, seen through the eyes of a non-professional journalist (who was just another viewer) for other viewers. The concept existed even earlier when we had our newspapers asking readers to submit articles about events that happened in the city.

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Can local news production be centralised?

APN, Australia’s regional media group, has its strength in the unique local content of its newspapers and websites. Why this came to be and how it was implemented...the article says it all

Peter Owen
Executive Editor
APN Group

CentralizedThis unique case study includes business elements (cost-cutting, re organisation, planning of new products), editorial aspects (editors' training, newsroom organisation) and a strong technology dimension (choice and implementation of a CMS system). Its newspapers are now produced from one centralised newsroom, using a single-database editorial system. The shift provides not only economies of scale, but also much improved products and more efficient handling of multimedia.

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Zones and esditions 

Zoning plays a key role in delivering local news effectively. An insight into how the process can be implemented in your newsroom

M Vedanayagam
General Manager – Composing
The Hindu

ZonesThe Concept: 
The concept was conceived from the idea of bifurcation of geographical partitions like States, districts, Corporations etc. This enables better governance. The introduction of post-codes (Zip Codes) made easy to introduce the concept of ‘Zoning’ in the News Paper industry. 

Need for Zoning: 
The zoning of various editions was well thought of as early as 1960s. People working in cities moved to the suburbs which is now called second-tier cities. They need to know the local news. At the same time the local advertisers find it easy to advertise in these areas spending a minimum cost.  

The U. S. based Gannett Research study says that “Local news consistently gets high ratings on the reader-interest scale. Reader focus groups say that local news is one of their primary reasons for reading news paper.’’

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The salvation of ‘community’ news

How Fwix is trying to aggregate hyperlocal news under one umbrella...

Community NewsIt is a known fact that today newspaper industry is in turmoil. The decline of newspaper industry is severely affecting channels of local news reporting. This fall gave an opportunity for bloggers and community-driven news sites to give news consumers their ‘local’ news.

Two years ago, 22-year-old Darian Shirazi made a jaw dropping move. He dropped out of the philosophy program at U-C, Berkeley, to start Fwix a little over a year ago, simply because – in his own words - “I no longer could find out what was going on in my own city (San Francisco).”

As the Fwix tag line goes, it helps you follow your city! Keep up with your favorite local topics, events, and places in real time. With this site, you have access to the latest local news stories from local sources and validated user-contributed content. Basically, fwix filters and find the best local information on blogs, news sites, and social media sites. For this to work in real time, David and his team use coding software like Python, C and java to source local content and tag it all under one city .

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