It’s the Databases, Stupid
The closing of Backfence this week has encouraged good discussion about hyperlocal content. Terry Heaton pulls some of the threads together in a post today.
He includes comments from Jeff Jarvis and Mike Orren, who point out the value of the content, but also the challenge of getting people to, first, read it, and, second, to contribute to it. Oh yeah, and generating revenue from it.
Is it compelling content? Yes, even if it’s not NEWS. I feel the conflict between NEWS and this other stuff all the time. I can express the journalistic mission of my organization in lofty terms along with the best of them, but I also find myself combing sites trying to find a nearby ethnic grocery or the latest freeway ramp closings.
Gathering the information is hard, but Adrian Holovaty’s announcement this week of a Python library that can scrape the data from a stack of web pages is a step forward. Regardless, it will still take a lot of work. Our newsrooms process tons of information every day, but Holovaty and others make the compelling argument that we waste it.
I came face-to-face with this problem on Friday at a meeting with public TV to discuss an Election ‘08 site we’re building together. Our news team knows, every day, which candidates are in Iowa, where they’re going, who they’re speaking to, when they’re going to do it. Our audience wants to know, too. Can we push it to the web easily? No, the information is scattered; it’s on Post-Its, in emails from the campaigns, written on calendars. We have a level of organization that allows us to get our job done, just barely. But now our job is expanding. Is one of my future News openings for a database expert? We can’t easily do all of the work ourselves, so it makes sense to find partners who are in the same business and work together.
What about the revenues? Hell if I know. 
Terry Heaton says:
The question is how do you make money in a disintermediated, distributed media paradigm? Experiments in hyperlocal media don’t fail because of content; they fail, because they can’t deliver the promise of sustainable revenue. [...] This is why I keep harping on organizing the local web and building databases of knowledge at the local level rather than trying to make another content play. [...] How we put advertisers together with users is the key, and “news content” isn’t the only way to do that.
