A real need for local news, “hyper” or not
Scott Karp wrote a kind of case study about what we all want from local news online, based on his quest for information about a big storm in his home area near Washington, D.C.
This is very instructive: What he wanted to know, and how hard it was to find.
His concern about power outages resonated with me, because we get some very bad storms in north-central Florida, and when all the lights on my street go out, I would really like to know what’s happening. Lacking a good local TV station and — like most of the United States — lacking any real radio news coverage, I would like to find updates online. But alas, local online news is practically nonexistent for my area.
You might think Scott would have better luck, being in a more developed, urban, sophisticated part of the country than I am. But the fact is, around Washington, all the journalists are obsessed with national and international stories. Local news is too mundane for their snooty tastes. I think this is reflected in The Wall Street Journal’s assessment of LoudounExtra.com — a local site without any local buy-in. This was always true of The Washington Post’s weekly (so-called local news) sections back in the early 1990s: Stories written by miserable young reporters stationed out in the burbs, stuck in shoddy offices far away from the action, covering pumpkin-patch parties in October and Easter-egg hunts in the spring.
Most of the time, there is no information I urgently need to know about my home area. This is true for most people in most places, I think.
But when there is something — a big storm, a forest fire, or something like a deadly chemical spill on the railroad, for example — where am I going to get up-to-date information?
I guess we’ll always have the crawler on some local TV station (e.g., “Tornado alert until 9 p.m. tonight”), but that’s very sparse compared to what would be possible online.
Sigh. I guess it’s my job here to be a defender of my former employer, but really, Mindy? “But the fact is, around Washington, all the journalists are obsessed with national and international stories.” That’s the fact? The Post doesn’t have *any* good local reporters at all? Certainly not any who, for example, have done great, great work on local stories about child welfare or public spending? Man, I wish we could have better discussions about this kinds of things without resorting to hyperbole.
And Karp’s post was fine, except for the fact that he didn’t realize until later (until a WPNI editor informed him – I guess he took some time off from not caring) that the local homepage had this information, but Karp wasn’t signed in to the site.
Now, you can debate the policy, or whether it’s implemented well, but can we do it without the straw men?
June 6, 2008 at 11:24 am@Derek:
We get to go around the web having this debate
I don’t disagree with the hyperbole, but you seemingly miss the forest for the trees. It’s not the users’ fault if they can’t find whatever good content you (and it’s just you, which isn’t reflective of what everyone thinks is good) think it out there.
Your straw man is that you believe that newspapers don’t need to change. That traditional journalism isn’t the issue.
But it is. There are signs everywhere, and until people realize (such as Zell) that the model needs to be knocked down and rebuilt — and it’s going to be — it’s hard to have a discussion because you look at a tree and think that’s the forest.
In one man’s humble opinion.
June 6, 2008 at 1:43 pmDerek, I think you are wearing your feelings a bit too low (allowing them to get stepped on by this blog post.)
The point is a great one, and very valid. Very few newspapers seem to have figured out that QUALITY CONTENT is what we want! Not a rehash of the same 10 stories that everyone else in the nation is covering.
I’m in the DFW area and it’s been frustrating to me on just how terrible the local news offerings are. I also usually resort to Google to get the info I need / desire.
June 6, 2008 at 1:47 pmMindy, really.
This is SO beneath you as an outstanding educator who works with talented young journalists:
“This was always true of The Washington Post’s weekly (so-called local news) sections back in the early 1990s: Stories written by miserable young reporters stationed out in the burbs, stuck in shoddy offices far away from the action, covering pumpkin-patch parties in October and Easter-egg hunts in the spring.”
If my memory of the time is right, wasn’t one of those so-called “miserable young reporters stationed out in the burbs” a young man named Jim Brady? Last time I looked, Jim was executive editor of WashingtonPost.com.
Right now, a graduate of George Mason University’s Journalism program is one of those “miserable young reporters.” Maybe I don’t know talent when I see it (I think you know my reputation is just the opposite), but that young man is one of the best young community journalists I know. So were others I recommended to the Post and who cover the “burbs.”
I know you have history with the early online Post initiatives, Mindy. I don’t know if that experience was good, bad or otherwise. But this comment is hardly fair to the Post, the Metro D.C. burbs, and to the young reporters who are trying to make a reputation for themselves — young reporters who someday may grow up to succeed like Jim Brady.
I trust this note will pass your moderation filters.
June 6, 2008 at 5:42 pmGosh, I guess it’s just not right to say “all” or “never.” I need to say “some” or “most” or “many.” Sorry about the sweeping generalizations.
I used to have to read the stories written by the Loudoun and Fairfax reporters every week when I was a Metro desk copy editor. No offense meant to anyone who ever worked in those suburban bureaus, but it’s not like a lot of hard news came out of there. Of course, how can you expect to really cover a county with a quarter-million residents with only two, maybe three, reporters?
I really am sincere when I say that it’s not the quality of the reporters that produces inadequate local coverage. A newspaper either puts enough people on the streets, or it doesn’t.
Of course the Post has some very good local reporters. Hamil Harris, for example, is one of the best anywhere, a journalist who really knows how to talk to people and tell a good story.
June 7, 2008 at 3:06 am@Brad:
“Your straw man is that you believe that newspapers don’t need to change. That traditional journalism isn’t the issue.”
Dude, that’s the most idiotic thing anyone’s ever said about my thinking on journalism (and that’s not hyperbole). I’m sorry, but if you spent, say, 5 minutes at my site you’d *know* that that statement is demonstrably false.
As I said in the initial post, you can and should talk about the best ways to make sure that good local content gets in front of readers, and it’s clear that the Post and other orgs are not as good as they should be on this front. But to say that most of the time there *is* no content, as Mindy said, is not true in this case. And that was the initial claim of Karp as well, until somebody from WPNI provided more information.
@Steve,
My feelings are that somebody as bright as Mindy doesn’t need to resort to sweeping generalizations in order to make a single point. I don’t think that’s such an unreasonable demand. Also, if it’s quality content you wanted on this DC-area storm, the Post had it in spades. Again, they could have done a better job of making it available, but the lack of content was NOT an issue in this case. Sorry that it seems to be in DFW.
June 7, 2008 at 8:11 amMore to Mindy’s point about emergency communications:
The overarching reason journalism exists is to present survival information — the critical stuff you need to know in a crisis.
Because most weather-related crises result in widespread power outages, the internet is all-but-useless in these situations (with one exception, which I’ll get to). Why? Because even if you have cell modem access, power outages result in heavily congested cell frequencies. I’ve been in two widespread weather events (snow and ice related; I live in snowy Upstate NY) and know from experience that you can’t get a cell connection most of the time in a crisis, and when you can, it’s choppy and likely to drop. SMS service is likely to be greatly delayed, making time-sensitive warnings unreliable.
This may not be true elsewhere in the world, where bandwidth is more plentiful. But it’s true here.
This leaves radio — battery-operated radio — as the best means of getting emergency info in a crisis. Unfortunately, radio has been taken over by the sharks and bean-counters, who have cut or marginalized news, so it’s likely that your next crisis will play out against a soundtrack of the latest hits.
Here, however, is the one good thing about internet publishing during a crisis: Because the net is worldwide, a local website can reassure people all over the world who have friends or relatives in a given crisis area. During an ice storm that cut power to our region for days, our website pumped out all the news and got many e-mails from out of towners looking for specific information and praising our stuff.
This will change if and only if cell and internet providers are pressed to deliver more bandwidth.
June 7, 2008 at 9:11 am@Derek: You are correct, Scott could have found more information, more easily, if he had been logged in (as he learned later). The Post did have it. And Dave Bullard makes an excellent point about radio and power outages, which is why lots of people in Florida have weather radios — and a stockpile of fresh batteries.
The point I was trying to approach (obviously I did a bad job of it) was that in all the various discussions of hyperlocal sites and strategies, we usually don’t talk about the times when a sharply focused local effort is really critical. A lot of the discussion about hyperlocal has centered on databases and/or user-generated content, rather than crises. I thought Scott’s post opened another venue for discussion about local emphasis.
June 7, 2008 at 9:34 am@Mindy: That is an excellent point, one that was obscured to me on my initial reading. Thanks for the clarification. Plus, as a former Postie, I know only too well how much Len Downie loves weather stories.
Derek
June 7, 2008 at 12:34 pmDon’t even START on how much Len Downie loves weather stories! Remember, I had to write heds for Metro!!! PAGE ONE WEATHER STORIES!
June 7, 2008 at 12:39 pmI so rarely participate in these discussions because I treasure the many friendships I have in the business (media and academia), and the temptation to be snarky in these forums is just too easy.
That said …
Minday writes:
Gosh, I guess it’s just not right to say “all” or “never.” I need to say “some” or “most” or “many.” Sorry about the sweeping generalizations.
Well … yes. We teach our students at Mason to avoid absolutes. I’m sure Mindy does, too, at Florida.
Mindy writes:
I used to have to read the stories written by the Loudoun and Fairfax reporters every week when I was a Metro desk copy editor. No offense meant to anyone who ever worked in those suburban bureaus, but it’s not like a lot of hard news came out of there. Of course, how can you expect to really cover a county with a quarter-million residents with only two, maybe three, reporters?
There are more reporters now, but better a WP person speak to how many.
June 7, 2008 at 1:53 pmEnough reporters?
Of course not.
As to breaking news, the weekly magazine format of these suburban publications never were and certainly aren’t now the best or intended format for hard/breaking news. They are a good place for enterprise and features, and that’s what you get.
But I no more look to a weekly to break news today (or even when Mindy worked at the Post) than I look to the Post print product to break news. If the Post is breaking news in print, then it’s sitting on the news, something else we (Cindy, me and other educators) teach our students NOT to do.
Like Mindy I tend to overstate the poor metro reporting that comes from the Washington Post. (IMHO, they see DC as the nation’s capital that just happens to have people living in the area. And so the priorities for the paper are to not look at the local news as something vitally important. Useful, yes. Important, maybe.)
I also know a number of metro reporters who go beyond the Easter egg roll or Halloween party kind of stories. (Unfortunately the Post thinks it only needs 3 reporters to cover the ethnic/immigrant communities here. These are the communities that compromise large portions of the area’s population — 27 percent in Fairfax County alone.)
But to the original point, getting accurate and timely local news about emergency situations is difficult. TV8 and the Fairfax Counts cable stations and web sites did a good job. Beyond that…Pretty lame.
I even got better notices from the emergency service at George Mason than I saw on the WashPost and WashTimes web pages. I got notices via e-mail and mobile phone text about the tornado warnings AND when the warnings were lifted.
What my wife could have used that day were better reports of downed trees. Seems just about every street — major and side — on her route home was either closed or reduced to one lane becuase of uprooted trees or downed powerlines. Had I a way to find out this info I would have passed it on to her by mobile phone so she would not need 2 hours to get to Fairfax from Arlington.
June 7, 2008 at 2:09 pmSo, this interesting discussion begs a key point: Is there a situation serious enough that a website that depends on being a national entity, such as WaPo’s, should consider switching to run an essentially local emergency info service for its primary coverage area?
Little local sites like mine — hey, this is our bread and butter. Radio (my last home before setting up online shop) doesn’t hesitate to drop the format and go all-crisis-all-the-time if the operation’s a good one and, likely, a primary EAS station.
Is this one more area of miscalculation for the big newspapers? Are their online operations simply too big, their business models “too national”, to tear up the format for a local emergency?
June 7, 2008 at 3:35 pm@Dave Bullard: Consider that the Post’s dot-com has something like 8 million non-local visitors (Kurtz) — that might determine the answer.
June 7, 2008 at 9:14 pmI just want to say that local is where most news organizations are going to find their niche. Ironically, the Post has other niches it can hammer in on (it is based in the nation’s capital afterall), so hyperlocal projects for exurbs might not be the best idea.
I’m starting to dislike the term hyperlocal. People are treating it like this mythical, unproven beast. But what most of us are arguing for us better local coverage. That’s something many news organizations used to do really well. Local reporting is not some unproven quantity.
At the end of the day I argue for niches, because in a World Wide Web world, anyone can get the big stories from a myriad of sources. But it’s those niches that can allow a news organization to stand out.
For the record, if I were to build a “hyperlocal” project it would be considerably different than LoudounExtra. The first thing I’d ditch is the weekly magazine format.
June 7, 2008 at 9:45 pmI agree with Pat on the use and concept of “niche” as opposed to “hyperlocal.” Right now, “hyperlocal” carries some personal baggage, I’m afraid.
When I was online sports editor at USA Today, our approach to sports was to strengthen niche coverage as manpower/resources allowed, but to have at least something on everything (or as much as possible) so that users and readers thought of USAT (print or online) as THE place to go. We might not be as deep as some other niche sites, but we weren’t afraid to tell our users about those sites and let them wander (a bit). I was confident that they would always come back to us as the starting point of their search.
Something I have found in directing print sports coverage over the years is that most editors (especially MEs and EEs) like a meat and potato diet. But we all know what happens when you don’t serve up enough veggies and fruits.
About a year or so ago, the WashPost decided to cut back on its print coverage of horse racing outside of the Triple Crown. But instead of telling readers that there would be increased coverage online (easy enough to do without increasing resources), the Post just treated this niche audience like it was unimportant and failed to move it online. This made no sense to me.
Niche audiences can be ignored only at great risk of losing audience.
June 8, 2008 at 12:58 pm[...] news about people, places and things that they know. I think that’s the interest behind the hyperlocal movement, although that’s been twisted to mean “more of the same local stories.” [...]
June 18, 2008 at 6:55 pm