What is a hyper local site?

Think globally, act hyperlocally

The fashion trend of the last two years is hyper-local media projects. Although the concept itself has not yet been settled, experiments in this direction are being conducted actively.

What was the impetus for the development of this idea? Two factors. The first is the inability of national media to meet the needs of local communities, aggravated by the economic crisis and the transition period in the evolution of traditional media. The second is the development of the Internet and digital technologies, which sharply reduced the cost of producing and publishing content.



Wikipedia believes that there are only three key elements in a hyper-local media project:

• the content concerns only a specific territorially limited community (city, town, etc.)
• The content is intended for consumption by this limited audience.
• Content created by a representative residing in a given territory.

Due to the fact that content production is cheap, there are many enthusiasts. And since they know local realities much better than any journalist of any large (federal) edition, then the value of the information they provide exceeds any publication of a major media outlet. Hence the success of small newspapers .



In general, hyper-local projects are not news for a long time, just no one tried to classify them in this way. They have existed for several years, both in the USA, Europe, and in Russia. But over the past year or two they have been getting more and more publicized. Even the industry of solution providers for such projects is being formed. The most prominent of its representatives, who were recently heard, is the project Outside.in . (At the time of this writing, this service collects news from 35312 cities and towns. All of them, however, are located in the United States. In addition to content, the site offers tools for publishers and bloggers.)



In practice, we see that instead of the wikipedia designation of hyper-local projects, any combination of the following features is used:

• geographical restriction of the target audience
• content filtered by the place of production and / or by the target consumption
• local media integration
• integration with local public institutions (business, NGOs, authorities)
• pronounced visual or thematic structuring of content based on geographic features
• lack of journalistic standards and industry standard media product requirements

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Perhaps hyper-local projects would not have paid much attention to themselves if it were not for the crisis in the American media. The dismissals in small newspapers led to the fact that a lot of professional journalists, being unemployed, began to create blogs in which they began to publish what was literally at hand. Some of them even began to earn their living and create their own media projects. It is too early to talk about a sustainable business model, but some of them have become profitable because they rely on the specific needs of people.



This attracted the attention of major American media. As a result, even monsters like ESPN launch hyper-local sites . The company plans to open sites in major US cities, relying on available resources and hiring only 15 people to service the nearest line of three sites. The Chicago site has already gathered over half a million visitors. It is interesting to note that local popular bloggers do not see him as a competitor and are even going to cooperate with him.



Let's see how events will develop. Will big media be able to give narrowly targeted content? Will they be able to strengthen their economies through hyper-local sites? Will there be a clear differentiation and preferences between organized journalism and unorganized civil society?



UPD Another example of how a large company uses hyper-local sites. The New York Times has launched websites for five districts in New Jersey and Brooklyn . They collect content from local bloggers, plus add content created by their own journalists. The average price for advertising on New York Times sites is $ 30 per thousand impressions, on local sites they have lowered it to $ 5.