Joshua Mack & Co.

Communications and technology for media and nonprofits

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Where are the hyperlocal media predictions for 2016

After my stints at LocalVox (which worked with local merchants to distribute their marketing information) and then at Blankslate (which was effectively the publisher of several of the largest local blogs in the country) I consider myself well out of local media. I still follow the  space still by subscribing to Street Fight. Like every news and pundit site they offered their list of things to look for in 2016. I was struck by the fact that none of their prognostications dealt with it, focusing instead on retailers, startup services, and beacons.

It was also interesting to me because I had just read an article on Nieman Journalism Lab about adding local news to people’s walls on FB. This in turn led me to think about outside.in where I had worked to develop a local blogger network and a toolkit that mapped stores to their locations. Outside.in may have been a bit ahead of its time as aggregating local stories and then placing them into FB and Snapchat would probably be a good service given how hard media is in general now an how difficult hyperlocal media is on top of that. It wouldn’t solve the problems that the creators of the stories face but it could get them in front of an audience where good things might happen. Foursquare might end up doing something similar with ads.

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Local TV News Is Following Print’s Path, Study Says – NYTimes.com

The report also highlighted the results of a new Pew survey that asked Americans whether they had heard much about the financial challenges that the news industry faces, like the steep decline in newspaper advertising revenue.

Sixty percent of the respondents said they had heard little or nothing, indicating that “awareness of the industry’s financial struggles is limited,” the report said. But some have sensed the results: 31 percent of respondents said they “have stopped turning to a news outlet because it no longer provided them with the news they were accustomed to getting.”

The report’s authors did find, as in prior years, a robust public appetite for news. Digital news sources are now used daily by 50 percent of Americans, according to Pew’s survey, making the Internet nearly as important a source as television. Mobile phones and tablets were mostly responsible for the surge in digital news consumption.

 

Local TV News Is Following Print’s Path, Study Says – NYTimes.com.