“Mobile changes everything” is now a cliche that is old and tired as I am after a redeye. But that doesn’t make it less true. Mobile is asking as to rethink our assumptions about how we live, work, shop, entertain and inform ourselves. The pocketable computers with invisible connections to “the network” has made it possible for a four-year-old Uber to upend the century-old taxicab business. Today, Amazon’s apps are threating Macy’s. We are using our iPhones as blood pressure machines. And we are just getting started.

Perhaps that is why it is time to rethink what it means to be a local media entity. So far, Local News has been nothing but a chimera, a graveyard of reputations and incinerator of hundreds of millions of dollars. Why did the world need Patch? Well, because we wanted to re-create old local papers on the web, but with fewer overheads and small news staffs that were paid like serfs. Today I read about the “corporate-pr posing as brand journalism” in places like Richmond, California.

No one has stopped and asked the question why do we need a newspaper style entity. Do we need local news when most people crave local information that is relevant and realtime? In this age of selfies, social and photo sharing, why not thinking about local information differently where locals engaged on the platform and provided updates that might be useful only in local context. Traffic jam on a busy street is a photo and a short SMS-length update. The news of a new restaurant can be shared as a photo and a few tips — recommendations that apps like Foursquare have already popularized.

I think the future of local news is very different than its past. It is less about newspapers, and more about platforms that connect. Today, news of fire in San Francisco comes over Twitter and while it is useful to those of us in South of Market Area, it can get lost in the unending wave of tweets. What if that information could be shared and given a local context by using the location beacons for geo-fencing.

In Roman times, there was a Praeco, a Newsreader  or a senate crier who would announce  daily the pronouncements of the Senate, public service announcements, business advertisements, and the current events of the Republic to the people in the Forum, or the town square. We have similar people in villages in different cultures. What mobile and technology enables us is to have a platform that plays a similar role where we the citizens are sharing the news. It is a Reddit style entity with communication at its core core, a platform where local politicians and city halls use the service to issue updates that impact their community. Or community shares the news as it happens and talks about it. It is not a social network, but more a social space. 

Thoughts? 

 

Om Malik

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. More....

10 thoughts on “Think different about local news”

  1. I agree the local news of the future will look nothing like the current local news. I wonder if the right solution is waiting for enough API’s to mash up local in a way that works well in a mobile app and personalizes to the user.

  2. The role of local news is not just to serve up information about traffic, restaurants etc. but to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”. We need local news to keep our politicians and corporations honest. Relying just on the NYT and the ProPublicas of the world to do investigative journalism is IMO a little too late because a lot of these problems start at the local level before bubbling to the national level. See for eg. the GW bridge closing. Also, if local media does not pay attention, we end up electing the wrong legislators who can cause a lot of damage that cascade to the national level (see how gerrymandering and redistricting have impacted governance in the United States). So I would be more tempered in my call for more citizen journalism and leave it to the professionals to do their job.

    3. I think there are two aspects of the local news and one aspect is news and the other is community. No were did I use the phrase citizen journalism — instead what I am suggesting is citizen based information sharing and discussion. That is very different that citizen journalism. Also, at a local level, the stories/exposes are rather rare because none of the papers really have the resources to get deeper investigations done. And even when they do, it is pretty rare.

      1. Om – What you say is all valid and sorry about the sloppy verbiage. But given what you say about resource constraints, would it not be better for money to be invested towards more investigative efforts than just another me-too app/platform? It might sound utopian but I feel that serious local news outside of community sourced information has a place in the media ecosystem of the future and it is vital for folks like you, with your access, to lead the charge to make local news more relevant.

        1. Krishnan

          The problem is that most of those in the media assume that investigative journalism is what the community needs. What community at local level needs is information that is relevant to their daily life. These days it means getting it fast and usually this is from people within the community. For investigative reports, there are new ways to finance the news — Beacon Reader and Inkshares are two perfect example of new platforms that can help with deeper reports. IN my experience, some of the toughest investigative work has come from local blogs that are run by individuals or groups from within the community. I don’t think the model of the old news works anymore in a local context.

  3. While I enjoy Twitter and Facebook for news snippets from friends and people I follow, for local news I enjoy one of my local newspapers, The VC Star. Their app provides me with notifications of local stories as they happen. I love the idea of aggregation, but when the VC Star can put a story together for me and alert me, as opposed to creating my own story from my aggregated feed, I can go on with my day without having to do research.

    The Patch was an outsiders attempt at understanding our local community, and probably did more harm than good, purely by providing loss-leading advertising rates with a short-term goals of achieving traffic to pay back their investors.

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