TBD.com – reinventing Hyperlocal
Revisiting Hyperlocal
Media companies – large and small – continue to look for ways to capture the huge market for local advertising (see here and here). Earlier this year, I posted a series of posts that surveyed the hyperlocal landscape – according to 5 core dimensions:
- Local News/Journalism
- Local Business/Commerce
- Local Advertising
- Local Community
- HyperLocal Business Models
- Enabling Technologies
I think I would now add one other dimension to this list:
- Local, Places, Things, and Events of Interest to me
But providing hyperlocal news and information as a viable business model has proved a challenging task for mainstream media organizations, as reflected by this post from Sean Carlton from March 2010 titled Is ‘Hyperlocal’ just hype?.
Witness for example, the New York Times decision to pass its community-driven blog in New Jersey to Baristanet.
Does this point to the failure of Hyperlocal for mainstream media organizations? Not so says Jeff Jarvis. In his own words:
For the record, I do not count The New York Times ending its New Jersey version of The Local and passing over its readers to Baristanet as a failure. The idea that The Times could have owned and run a blog with a journalist in every town and neighborhood in New York — let alone America — simply didn’t scale. The more important skill for The Times to learn is working with networks of independent entrepreneurs who own and run their own local enterprises.
Enter TBD.com
Enter TBD.com
TBD.com is a local/community newsite based in Washington DC that fully integrates social media tools and community into the newsgathering process. I borrowed those words from an excellent article by Vadim Lavrusik’s excellent review: TBD.com Takes a Community-Driven Approach to Newsgathering.
As Lavrusik points out, what most differentiates TBD.com is its network of local bloggers – 127 and counting – that will provide content and coverage for its site. This phenomenon of incoporating the local community and bloggers as fundamental participants in the news gathering process is sometimes referred to as Community Journalism – and it represents a profound change to how news is generated and reported in our communities.
Jeff Jarvis, Matthew Ingram, and Newsonomics also covered the launch of TBD.com, and had interesting insights to share.
So who’s behind TBD.com?
Just a few familiar names. TBD.com is led by Community Engagement Director Steve Buttry. Obviously this role is a highly strategic one, but it’s not like Buttry hasn’t thought about community engagement!
Equally interesting is the involvement of GrowthSpur. GrowthSpur will work with TBD.com to develop new business models around local news, content, and advertising.
Note that GrowthSpur’s other media partner is the Journal Register, John Paton’s company, and the instigator of the Ben Franklin project.
Location, Mobile, Video, and Social Media
All four will be key pillars of TBD.com’s strategy for sharing and delivering news and information to their communities.
In Summary …
With TBD.com, we’re seeing nothing short of a bold new attempt to reinvent local media – in terms of content, format, organization, and process. It should be an interesting experiment to follow.
glenn
Insight into the Future of News Media – Looking forward to 2010
So with the new year fast approaching (like 10 hours away), I thought I’d aggregate some of the best insight in 2009 into the future of News Media. As I work in the Publishing industry for a large Canadian media company, I’m going to exclude (for the most part) trends in the Broadcast (i.e. TV) industry, and focus specifically on online journalism.
Insights from a handful of Thought Leaders
So here it goes, links to posts from a handful of thought leaders that provide a good overview of the changing world of News Media as we enter 2010.
Jeff Jarvis
One could do worse than review the top Jeff Jarvis posts of the past year to get a feel for the future of news media. Here are some of my favorite Jarvis posts of the past 6 months or so:
- A Scenario for (Local) News
- The annotated world
- Bankruptcy Squandered
- Page & Brin: Icons of the decade
- Google’s synchronicity
- Content farms v. curating farmers
- Media after the site
- The new divide: Walled v. open
- New Business Models for News talk
- The opportunity of bankruptcy
- The balance shifts
- The future of business is in ecosystems
- The future of news is entrepreneurial
- NewBizNews & Hyperpersonal news streams
- Aspen: live
- New Business Models for News Project
- The new news
Vadim Lavruiski at Mashable
Kevin Sablan had an interesting post a few days ago titled 2009, the year social media covered journalism. He makes the point that, in 2009, many social media blogs started to prominently cover the news media industry. No site did this better than Mashable, and no blogger at Mashable did this better than Vadim Lavruiski. Here are my favorite posts from Lavruiski over the past several months:
- 10 News Media Content Trends to Watch in 2010
- 8 News Media Business Trends for 2010
- 12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive
- 7 Ways News Media are Becoming More Collaborative
- 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist
Clay Shirky
*** Updated January 2 2009 ***
The other news media visionary that looms large over the landscape (that does not work for Google!) is media socialogist Clay Shirky. For a wonderful exploration of the core challenges facing newspapers in the rapidly-changing media environment, please see my blog post Clay Shirky on the future of Journalism – Shorenstein Center talk from Sept 09.
*** End of update ***
Top Trends for 2010
There has also been many posts in recent days on top trends in both news media and the Web generally. Here’s a sampling.
Top News Media Trends for 2010 – Additional Posts
A collection of posts on top news media trends for 2010:
- Media Predictions for 2010 – Pat Kitano
- Out on a limb again: Predictions for 2010 – Martin Langeveld
- 10 trends in journalism in 2010 – Adam Westbrook
- Trends 2010: Hyperlocal – The Guardian
- Seven Predictions for 2010 from eMarketer’s CEO – Geoff Ramsey
Top Web/Digital Media Trends for 2010
A collection of posts on top Web/Digital Media trends in 2010, and a review of Google’s 2009:
- ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends of 2009 – Richard MacManus
- 10 Web trends to watch in 2010 – Pete Cashmore
- Web Meets World – My blog post referencing Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle
- 5 Big Real-Time Web Trends of 2009 – by Samuel Axon at Mashable
- 10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010 – Ravit Lichtenberg
- Top 10 Mobile Predictions for 2010 – Millennial Media
- Mobile Advertising: 5 Things You Need to Know to Succeed in 2010
- Google’s 2009: A Glimpse of the Web’s Next Decade
Technology/Spaces I’ll be watching in 2010
And finally, here’s some key technologies and spaces I’ll be watching closely and spending time learning about in 2010 (in the rough order that they occurred to me):
- Social Web and Social Media
- Online Identity
- Real-time Web
- Geo-location
- Web meets World
- Google, Facebook, and Twitter
- Machine Learning/Collective Intelligence
- Semantic Web
- HyperLocal and Community
- Mobile
- Image Recognition
- Augmented Reality
- Search
- Media Revenue Models
- Multimedia
- Business Innovation
In Summary …
Well, there you have it. A quick wrap-up of key insights and trends in the changing world of News Media and related Technology. Hope you found something of value to take away. 🙂
glenn