In his
latest post to Publishing 2.0, Mark Briggs summarizes a conference on online development and concludes the future is very much hooked into local.
It's an immature space, he hears, and there is sufficient scale to make a business out of it. Newspaper retrenchment, mobile emergence and the spoils will go to those organizations that connect local business with worthwhile content.
"But if you work for a local news organization that isn’t serving local businesses with innovative digital solutions, better buckle up," he writes.
Briggs spills out his notepad in the post, but it's a useful primary guide.
Josh Korr in Publishing 2.0 identifies a central problem in the recent efforts by some media organizations to aggregate local information with an extensive series of links.
The problem is that it's often unhelpful to offer so much help. It can add to the load just enough to make it overload.
His argument, though, is the benefits outweigh the detriments --- that the advantages of a composite sketch of local stories is useful, even if they can't all be read.
My view, for what it's worth: These are early days in the link economy and in aggregation, and we're all still feeling our way in determining how to serve as a filter and a funnel, a gatekeeper and an enabler, an authenticator and a conduit. Maybe it's too early for a good debate on this. Maybe we just need to let it happen for some time and sort through what works.
New media are starting to connect with the notion that hyper-local ads at low cost can engineer growth and haul in the low end of the advertising food chain beneath the noses of bigger media.
The strength of targeted, lower-cost online media spending is offering an option to retailers and services in communities . Larger legacy media are having more difficulty in making this adjustment, notes Dow Jones Newswire.
Journalism 2.0 asserts that not all is lost on the local news frontier online. It's still possible to develop value through joint ventures and connections, that it's not necessary to do everything any longer, and that it's time to hit the ground running now.
In the end, everything is local.
It should not surprise anyone that Huffington Post, the most successful pure-play online news entity, would shift its attention to local franchising at some stage. Their/her first stop is Chicago, where HuffPost will aggregate local news, blogs and content, but dozens of U.S. cities are on the horizon.
Meantime, Topix has entered into a handful of content deals in listings, apartments, TV and movie listings, business and (yes) pet directories. It's shifting itself from a mainly news to a broader portal locally.
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