Journalism.co.uk: Hyperlocal news site outside.in confirms UK launch
Thursday, 2 October 2008, 19:54
"Hyperlocal news and information site outside.in has confirmed it will launch in the UK." Cites "The demand for personalized information on the web, and the failure of the newspaper industry to capitalize on featuring hyperlocal content".
Planning applications as hyperlocal news
Monday, 22 September 2008, 07:59
The mysterious Grey Cardigan this weekend blogged about his infuriation with his local weekly’s habit of using news of local planning applications to fill the space left over above the birth, death and marriage announcements in the classified section:
[T]aken as a measure of usefulness to readers living in rural idyll, whether or not a near neighbour is about to attach a carbuncle to their cottage is probably the most important news the paper can bring us; more so, even, than the inevitable uproar about bin collections on the front page.
But because the space available for planning applications is variable, some weeks they will be perfectly legible while on others they will be down to 6pt or worse, or even published incomplete or left out altogether. I know it’s a small thing, but it annoys me that such a valuable service is treated so poorly. It might be ineptitude, it might be laziness, but it’s little things like this that endanger sales.
I hope Grey will forgive the intervention of a mere newsroom “Web Monkey (Special Projects)” like myself, but he is absolutely right.
In addition to endangering their print sales, the approach to planning applications taken by Grey’s local rag is also endangering the relevance of its website — even though its parent company has, no doubt, recently professed a “hyperlocal” news strategy of some sort.
In online journalism circles, this would be discussed as an example of what Steven Johnson calls the “Pothole Paradox“: the fact that seemingly trivial developments happening near people’s homes interest them a great deal, while similar events occurring 100 metres further down the road are mind-numbingly boring.
The trick is to find a technological solution that will solve this paradox by targeting hyperlocal information, like planning application news, to only the handful of people who care a great deal about any given instance of it. Websites like Johnson’s Outside.in and Everyblock are attempting to do this through geotagging local public sector information and local bloggers’ posts to deliver this sort of “pothole news” to people wherever they live.
Its also the sort of thing that (most) local newspapers — and their websites — don’t do particularly well.
While the Grey Cardigan’s local paper is (like many others like it) still squeezing planning application details into 6pt type, two UK websites - PlanningAlerts.com and PlanningFinder.co.uk are busy coming up with a better way of providing this information to its former readers.
Both sites work the same way: Enter your postcode, and the site will automatically send you an e-mail alert if any neighbour within a given radius proposes said monstrous carbuncle extension.
Why aren’t local papers providing clever online services like this? It’s certainly a medium more appropriate to reporting planning applications than a weekly digest in 6pt type.
Services mapping local information to readers’ location like this are a tiny part of a bigger trend to develop the geographic web and its ancillary, local search — where the relevance of information is measured by its proximity to readers’ current location or to places significant to them. The mobile phone operators understand the commercial significance of this, as does Google. Why do you think they are investing so much money in cartography?
They’re coming after the local papers that no longer offer the most efficient way of getting local information to their readers.
outside.in: Radar Email Alerts. New!
Wednesday, 10 September 2008, 10:52
"[Y]ou can now opt to receive email alerts for your [Outside.in] Radar. You’ll get an email anytime someone publishes news happening within 1,000 feet of your selected location, or about any topic or favorite place you’ve added to your Radar."
Tuesday, 20 May 2008, 15:46
Comments
"Outside.in, the Brooklyn-based "place-blogging" site (or "hyper-local news site", take your pick) has raised a $3 million round and hired a CEO — Mark Josephson, the former president of ad network operator Seevast."
Sunday, 9 March 2008, 21:55
Comments
"On My Radar lets you zoom down and see all the current buzz on the block you’re standing on, while simultaneously keeping tabs on places around the country that interest you.” It uses Yahoo’s FireEagle location technology."
Friday, 1 February 2008, 15:05
Comments
"Outside.in, a New York-based site that aggregates town-specific news, blog posts, and business listings into a sort of Local News 2.0, formally launched a discussion forum feature on Wednesday."
Friday, 25 January 2008, 13:29
Comments
"We’re not just geographically organizing the blogger content — we’re organizing the Post’s content. That’s because our system is designed to track geographically pretty much anything that outputs a feed. So building a map like this for another
Thursday, 24 January 2008, 15:03
Comments
Fred Wilson: "Techcrunch calls outside.in a competitor of EveryBlock. I think collaborator is more like it. It’s going to take more than one company to rebuild the local newspaper from the ground up."
Thursday, 15 November 2007, 13:20
Comments
"One of my messages during the webinar was that newspaper websites need to ’stop being islands.’ The thing with the web is: there’s a wealth of content — news and information — being produced that covers your local community."
News values in hyperlocal journalism
Thursday, 8 November 2007, 09:50
In hyperlocal news, one reader’s banality is another’s vital intelligence.
Writing on the first anniversary of his geotagging and hyperlocal news project Outside.in, Steven Berlin Johnson provides a great annecdote about how hyperlocal news coupled with geotagging can create enormous value for readers, even where individual pieces of information available may seem trivial to users who [...]
Thursday, 11 October 2007, 07:38
Comments
"Outside.in, the Brooklyn-based ‘place blogging’ site, has raised $1.5 million, which it will use to build out the site and develop a geo-targeted ad platform."
Bank Holiday catchup
Tuesday, 10 April 2007, 15:11
Best Easter-related wacky headline over the Bank Holiday perdiod goes to tech web site The Register, which graced RSS feeds with “Godless North Korean commies ate my monster rabbits“.
Other things we learned over the past four days include:
Journalists at the Business 2.0 received their first blog bonuses. Since late last year, editor Josh Quittner has [...]
Friday, 6 April 2007, 13:42
Comments
Steve Outing: “My hometown newspaper seldom has news about the elementary school that my … daughter goes to. But a hyper-local … approach would mean that the newspaper website taps everyone outside … who [is] writing anything about the school.”
Friday, 6 April 2007, 13:42
Comments
Steve Outing: "My hometown newspaper seldom has news about the elementary school that my … daughter goes to. But a hyper-local … approach would mean that the newspaper website taps everyone outside … who [is] writing anything about the school."
