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.

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.

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?

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.

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.
Enough 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.

Derek

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.