It’s global, and it’s a village

By tids

By Simon van Wyk

The Internet, as they say, is a broad church. It’s becoming easier to find both global and local news online.

Google has just released a beta version of a new service called Google Fast Flip, which offers up a scrolling bar of pre-loaded news pages from a range of websites which you can “flip” through and click on the ones you want to read in full screen mode. By sharing the revenue from contextual ads, Google says it’s doing this to help save the newspaper industry, while industry spokespeople say it’s another nail in their coffin. Time will tell who’s right.

googlefastflip

Meanwhile, as Tony Surtees points out in this month’s HotHouse podcast
, in the US there has been an explosion of ‘hyperlocal’ media – news services that provide information for towns, neighbourhoods, even streets. Some of these services are offshoots of local newspapers, while others are set up by passionate local bloggers. They all rely on citizen journalism; i.e., free labour from untrained writers.

Hyperlocal media is also taking off in Australia, provided by groups including iPRIME, the online arm of the Prime television network, set up by Tony Surtees, and OurPatch, an independent network of online communities for regional and rural Australia (which I have an interest in).

uprime_ourpatch

Tony says iPRIME was set up because there was little or no local information available online for Prime’s regional TV viewing audience. “We decided to create a network of hyperlocal sites which focused on happenings and events in a 20-30 km radius of communities in our viewing area. That proved to be unique.” As well as encouraging viewers to post their stories, the forums have proved popular on the iPRIME sites.

“Yes, it’s the World Wide Web, but it’s also what affects me in my immediate community,” according to Tony.

And there’s a lot happening in local communities, not just news stories, but also in economic terms. A recent Kelsey Group showed that 80% of GDP is spent by people within a 20-25 km radius of their home. That means there’s a market for hyperlocal advertising online.

So who is more likely to succeed in the hyperlocal media derby - traditional media companies, with their existing infrastructure, or small, independent, crowd-sourcing online publishers? Tony thinks there is room for both. As Tony says, “TV can’t get to consumers in the middle of the day, but online can. Data from the US and UK data indicates that the sorts of things consumers go to a local website for are different than what they watch on the TV – it strengthens and reinforces your offline presence.”<-->

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