From Media Transparent.

What’s missing from sites focused on a city? Community organizers. It’s the same leadership dilemma facing any organization, whether physical or virtual. Hyperlocal sites need to be driven and organized by hubs and influencers of the local community, and these hubs need to feel invested and committed to their “city site”.

Hyperlocal “news” sites like Outside.In and Topix automatically pull feeds from local publishers to re-create a local newspaper. Although there are sporadic comments to articles, there is little community engagement. CitySearch and Yahoo! Local serve as online Yellow Pages.

Engaging hyperlocal sites need “word of mouth”

In many cities, the best hyperlocal sites are developed by somebody, some company or group in the community. In Santa Barbara, Edhat.com, developed by a local software company, has distinguished itself in providing compelling local content.

Hyperlocal social networks a la Ning generally don’t gain traction (show me one that does) because it takes too long for anybody to invest the time to set up a complete profile. Twitter makes hyperlocal communication easy because it can serve as a proxy social network for a local community that “follows” each other. There’s no login/profile setup requirement, just tweet.

Breaking News City sites that aggregate local Twitter feeds across various categories are being developed in cities across the country by individuals, and groups like chambers of commerces, who are hubs of their communities. They invest their time to create a useful hyperlocal community site by providing local Twitterers a venue to gain exposure in the community. There’s energy in facilitating the community conversation that “national” sites like Topix and CitySearch don’t have.

Example Breaking News City sites:

Asheville NC
Boston
Del Mar
London
Long Beach
Los Angeles
New York
Orange County
Sacramento
San Francisco
Toronto

Even in huge metropolitan cities, every journalist is familiar with the concept of hyper local news and what it looks like. But what does hyper, hyper local news look like?

Small newspapers do a great job of reporting local happenings to a relatively small town or community, but they lack the resources necessary for their news to leap off the pages. (Think VH1’s Pop-Up Video TV show minus the video.)

Thanks to an all-star team of media professionals who aim to provide a unique community newspaper for every block in the neighborhood, the concept of ultra hyper news is much closer to reality. Their project, EveryBlock.com is a news site that takes information from various sources and arranges it by date in its geographical location.

From EveryBlock:

“We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. We’re a geographic filter — a ‘news feed’ for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your block.”

The concept is similar in scope to the popular Google mashup chicagocrime.org, which was created by EveryBlock team leader Adrian Holovaty.

While the site is a resource for both local citizens and journalists alike, it does not claim to be a city directory.

“We focus on news, as opposed to static data. On EveryBlock, you’ll find a list of recent restaurant inspections near you, but you won’t find a list of the train stations or schools… Roughly speaking, we’re interested in local data that has a date and a specific location.”

Right now the site only covers New York City, San Francisco and Chicago but more will be added in the future, according to information in the site’s about page.

If you live in one of these cities, leave a comment with some of your thoughts on EveryBlock.

Nashville is talking, but it never used to. Not even a year ago Tennessee’s capital city was just reading and watching, maybe blogging a little bit— but no talking, no commenting, and definitely no tweeting.

For those not privy to the slang, a “tweet” is a single 140-character message sent via twitter.com and Nashville has been sending an awful lot of them, according to WKRN broadcast news producer Christian Grantham.

“I didn’t come to Twitter until last year, after pretty much everyone in Nashville had already jumped on board,” says Grantham, who now uses the service daily as the voice of the station’s NashvilleIsTalk.com — a site devoted to interacting with the community.

Rather than use a standard template developed for a group of organizations under the same corporate ownership, NIT uses a customized Drupal theme, which allows for easy integration with other social sites such as twitter, blogger, and other blog sites.

NashvilleIsTalking.com all but abolishes the need for staple feature pieces like “man-on-the-street.” Rather than one person being tasked with asking strangers a common question for the community’s reaction, you can now visit NIT. Registered users can maintain profiles, create and moderate groups, vote on aggregated content, browse the comments of Nashville area Twitter users, read Nashville-area blogs and much more.

In addition to its social networking components, Grantham uses the site’s front page to debut the story he’s working on through out the day, which gives the community a chance to improve the direction of information and often fill in gaps in reporting, he says.

“It has really become an important tool for me in the newsroom. Not only am I able to share breaking news items, but I also share news leads that come from Twitter with the producers.

“Had I joined Twitter when everyone else did I’d probably still be tweeting what I ate for lunch,” Grantham says.

For more insight into how to make local news interactive, check out Grantham’s responses to interview questions below:

What attracted you to the job of community-journalist for NIT / WKRN?

I rediscovered a passion and began searching for a job in communications using the web. WKRN stood out to me for a couple of reasons. Most importantly they seemed to have a clear vision of the role the net can play in connecting directly with an audience.

How much of NIT was realized before the site was created?

The concept of the site being a single authored blog had already been in place by the time I got here. It used a MovableType platform at the time. All the content was created by one author, and [a mix of] paid and volunteer authors on the weekend. Shortly after arriving, I migrated NIT to the more open-source platform Drupal, which opened us up to using a world of plugins. I created other blogs for staff and also balanced that with producing an evening newscast. It was a very difficult balancing act.

When management changed, NIT went through a widely noted transition period that was very difficult on the community. We lost our blogger, Brittney Gilbert, who was viewed as a voice for the community. It took some time before I could focus full time on the site. Once I could, I worked with a sister station to transform the site into something more than a blog.

What has changed since then?

Now the site does much more than current blog platforms can. Registered users can maintain profiles, create and moderate their own groups, vote on aggregated content, browse the tweets of Nashville area Twitter users, quickly see what Nashville area bloggers are posting about in the NIT Cloud (a cloud of terms aggregated from the daily posts of more than 250 area blogs), and a lot more. The site literally provides over 100,000 RSS feeds of any topic you can imagine. If you want a feed of all Nashville area blog posts about the Titans, you got it.

The investment in Nashville Is Talking by new management has allowed it to become a powerful and robust extension of the original vision of providing the community a platform to connect with each other based on their shared values and interests. The more robust community-driven platform also brings a dose of reality to that vision in terms of creating a more viable community-driven model. The model before that had predictable problems that are addressed by turning the site over to the community.

When did you become familiar with twitter, digg, and other social networking tools?

I became familiar with social networking tools in 2000. In 1999, I began what is now called “blogging” at my own personal website. I was manually posting and archiving entries. Shortly after that, a friend introduced me to MovableType. Things snowballed from there. Before that, I used BBS’s. Things have really changed over the past 12 years!

Would you call yourself an early adopter of new technology?

I don’t view myself as an early adopter of technologies. After the “dot com” era of the late ‘90s, I tend to follow everyone else’s pain and then settle on what works. I’m not in a rush to show off the fact that I bought the latest gadget. I like to show off the fact that I bought what works [at a] way cheaper [price] and with upgrades, even if that means coming a year late. I didn’t come to Twitter until last year, after pretty much everyone in Nashville had already jumped on board.

How has the community interaction changed your reporting?

It really has become an important tool for me in the newsroom. Not only am I able to share breaking news items, but I can also share news leads that come from Twitter with the producers. Since using it this way, I’ve noticed [that community interaction has] started to become widely discussed and reported. Had I joined Twitter when everyone else did I’d probably still be tweeting what I ate for lunch.

[From previous question:] Any examples come to mind?

I think the perfect example of my own evolving use of Twitter is in disseminating valuable information from the newsroom. One example came during the deadly tornadoes. I tweeted reported rotations in real time. I also fed reports from the field back into the newsroom. I used Twitter recently to live tweet a police chase on I-40 a couple of weeks ago, knowing people read their tweets in traffic.

Do you actively search for Nashville folks with a web presence?

I do actively seek new Nashville area blogs to add to the NIT site. I also find them through Twitter. I also have them emailed to me from people that want to be aggregated on the site.

Many organizations are just now shifting to a social network-based Web site rather than the usual news and content-only sites. (The NYT’s just introduced Times people to their site)…Why or why not is this easier at a local level?

It’s a double-edged sword. Larger national media outlets have the resources to invest in development or re-skinning open source platforms and molding them in their own image or crafting them to fit their strategic vision. On a local level, resources are often hard to come by, and what you get is a cobbling of platforms to achieve the same thing. That said, on a local level is where you grow the kind of dedicated and high quality relationship with your audience. That’s very important to the sense of community that often fuels social media relations across multiple platforms.

It’s an exciting thing to see happen, and every corporation can benefit from moving in this direction. Eventually community presence in national media and larger corporations will be looking for the experience many of us are gaining on a local level. There is only so much you can expect from marketing your company to consumers through traditional advertising. There is no direct relationship in advertising and marketing as we know it, and that world will dramatically change in the next few years.

Is there anything I haven’t touched on that you’re particularly interested in saying? (Like about the site, community, etc. anything.)

I love working with people who see the importance of the role the net will play in transforming the way the world gets and interacts with information. I also love working with veterans of news, and I will always remember the challenges they face with the changes that are happening. For some, that change is very difficult. But the fact is, we are no more in the television and newspaper business than Wal-Mart is in the trucking business. Our business is no longer the industry that surrounds distribution – the trucks, the printing press, the reams of paper, the broadcast towers, the satellite dishes, the lights, the huge cameras, the buildings, the “live trucks”… It’s the final product: information. The market in an on-demand world for news and information where people have to wait to receive a highly produced product is steadily shrinking. At the same time, the online audience for news and information is growing significantly. It’s an exciting time to be working in a new medium that is transforming the way we get information.

The last step in the rise of the blog will be the connection of virtual and real space. Your favorite blogger might be in New York, but if you’re living in Oregon, chances are he’s not going to be covering local ordinances or missing dogs.

This is a crucial step for citizen journalism and the democratic process in general. When supporting local causes is as easy as checking your RSS reader, and when the paths of communication are transparent, the seemingly giant gap between an initial desire for change and actually seeing results evaporates.

So how do you find out who’s blogging in your neighborhood? Many hyperlocal blog directories are sprouting up and existing blog aggregators are growing local searches in order to fill this emerging demand. Here are a few of the better ones. (Don’t see your favorite local blog search here? Let us know in the comments of this post.)

Placeblogger.com: The most recent and promising site on the scene, to which Jay Rosen serves as an advisor, Placeblogger has a slick interface and enough buzz to draw a healthy amount of contributors.

If hyper-local citizen journalism were a sandbox, there would be no king. All of the kids would be purposefully small and scattered. There is nothing to run except the castle you build yourself.

But Backfence was always beefier than most of the children. In May 2005, when it launched, it was surrounded by substantial buzz partly in virtue of its two highly-respected co-founders, Susan DeFife and Mark Potts. Then it raised $3 million in October 2005 from Omidyar Network, SAS Investors, and other investors in the Washington area. Fast-forward to 2006 and there are 13 Backfence communities centered around three metropolitan areas (Chicago, Washington D.C. and San Francisco) and organized into a network.

On Jan. 5, the big kid took a big hit… and everyone in the sandbox took notice. It’s reported that about two-thirds of the Backfence managment staff has left, along with Defife.* DeFife sent this note to Greg Sterling at Screenwerk:

“I wanted to let you know that the management team (Amanda Graham, Bob Kelly) and I have left Backfence. […] Ultimately, we did not share the same strategic vision for the company as the Board of Directors.”

Potts has returned as the interim head of the site. (He had left the management team in late 2006.) “I was still on the board, so it wasn’t as if I had left,” Potts says. “It was an honor to be asked to come back. I am excited by the support of the investors and the board. Hopefully I’ll stay indefinitely. But it’s all happened in the last couple of days, so I don’t really know.”

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the Backfence downsizing story, but those who are watching—i.e. everyone in the citizen journalism community—have been drawing lessons from this past week already.

On the surface, Jose Rivera of East-Harlem.com and Marina Ortiz of East Harlem Preservation don’t have much in common. But they both possess a love for their hometown and desire to present a positive image of East Harlem in the face of perceived bias and neglect from the mainstream media.

“I think people want to feel like the people they know matter,” said Ortiz, who grew up in East Harlem and returned to the neighborhood two years ago after spending several decades in the northwest Bronx. “That’s how I shape my Web site.”

“I wanted a place where people in the community could come and see their news,” Said Rivera, a Navy veteran and lifelong New Yorker who started East Harlem.com 11 years ago.

When John Byrne wanted to upgrade the computers his staff at The Raw Story were using, he reached out to the readers of the news website to help pay for the upgrade. His audience was equally generous when he wanted to bring on board additional staff to launch Raw Story’s own investigative work.

Byrne calls the donation drives part of a hybrid business model. “Most of our funding is from advertisers, but when we want to do more extensive projects, we’ve found our readers to be very responsive when presented with specific goals.”

Chris Lopez’s post below got me thinking about the latest savior of newspapers, going hyperlocal. I’m all for it – everybody wants to know what’s going on in the community, on their street if possible. They like reading about themselves – and learning more about what is literally going on around them. In my neighborhood, for example, there are two or three local listservs that are constantly humming with tips and information about local development news, recent crimes, new restaurants, yard sales. In most places a gulf still yawns between this ongoing conversation and the local newspaper. Lots of interesting and important stuff gets passed over out as too local, too parochial, too small. There have never been enough staffers or space in the paper to get down to the block-by-block level. Now, on the web, space is no problem. With online networking of various kinds, finding what’s happening on a given block is no longer a problem either.

But even with these tools now at their fingertips, newspapers aren’t that great at this. The Washington Post is my local paper, and has a great, nationally-acclaimed website. But if you drill down past the marquee stuff – the political and foreign reportage, opinion, Style – it starts to get fuzzy. One example: The other day I wanted to place an announcement of an upcoming event on the Saturday religion page. The first problem was navigating to the spot to submit something. I know where and when to find this info in the daily paper, but I didn’t have that. On the website, you have to find the religion page, scroll to the bottom to find event listings, click on that, then go to the end of the second page to find a sentence telling you what to do (mail something in, call, or – last – send an email). It’s now Saturday night – but this week’s event listing, from this morning’s paper, has not yet been posted to the page. If I’m looking to attend some event on, ahem, Sunday, I’m out of luck.

It’s easy to see what happened here. Somebody has transferred the content of the dead tree edition to the web – too slowly – but not thought about how to use the power of the new format.

So, great on the hyperlocal, for existing newspapers and new ones as well. An old friend, Paul Bass, founded a hyperlocal paper called the New Haven Independent that skillfully burrows into the life of that city, and does it on a shoestring. You don’t need a huge corporation backing you to do this. That’s great. But that fact alone could mean trouble for traditional newspapers going this route - they won’t have the field to themselves.

That’s just one of the caveats with going hyperlocal.

In 2004 and the beginning of 2005, the Contra Costa Times established its strategic plan for the future, built around the concept of hyper-local news. The 180,000-circ. newspaper (200-plus journalists), located east of San Francisco, would create a citizen-based site to emphasize unique-value local content, and then match that vision in print.

The hyper-local concept would allow the paper to establish the capability for citizen participation in its news creation. It would hold community meetings to recruit citizen journalists, then offer those citizen journalists training in order to create pro-am journalism projects. I know about it because I was one of the architects of the plan in my position as executive editor and vice president of news. Little did we know that Knight Ridder, our parent company, would soon be on the auction block, and the vision we created would be collecting dust.

Fast forward to November 2006, and the memo issued by Gannett CEO Craig Dubow. In it he calls for an emphasis on “local,local” content.

Last week we found out there are conscious plans for journalism and crowdsourcing in the works. But instances are already taking place in newsrooms all over America intuitively. When a local reporter takes interest in a discussion thread on the newspaper’s website, then reports out what citizens are saying, this is the dawn of open source journalism.

Take the case of the Contra Costa Times and its reporter, Simon Read, which happened just 13 weeks ago when I was the executive editor of the newspaper. When almost 200 complaints about a carpet business fired up our discussion boards it led to great community reporting that was informed by the community itself.