Local news has big future
THE internet puts vast knowledge, global news, and instant social connections at everyone’s fingerprints. Many people have Facebook friends on four or five continents, and we’re able to consume news from dozens of locales at a glance. In the digital era, we truly are a smaller world.
But digital is also a magnifying technology, potentially making the most mundane and tiny accessible to the world.
The fashionable term hyperlocal captures the insanely small – the cliche of what you had for breakfast, or what is happening not just in your suburb, but in your street – and the ability to broadcast this to the world.
Yes people buy The Herald or access it online to get some news of the wider world, but increasingly for city and town based newspapers, the appeal for audiences lies in accessing a very precise “here” and a very immediate “now”.
In South Africa, and for many countries around the world, power is local.
It is the local municipality, the local clinic or police station, the shops down the road and potholes in the local road, that people care most about.
Big national media resources will never be able to service this need for local data as well as those with resources and connections on the ground.
As newspapers in particular battle for share of attention, and as print sales fall, there has been a realisation in newsrooms across the world that one of the things people are prepared to pay for online is fresh local news.
And while local papers can’t have a journalist on every street corner, the instant connectivity of social media provides a potentially even more powerful “workforce”. Everyone is a potential reporter in the digital era.
Everyone can snap a photo of a broken water pipe, or tweet about the factory on fire down the road.
Journalists and newspapers are moving to become organisers, and sense makers – curators – of local news in ways that combine social/citizen input with professional reporting.
This concept of curating is core to hyperlocal journalism.
Part of curating is pulling together disparate strands of a single story, and providing the platform, but as im- portant is sorting out what is ‘really real’. Did that restaurant really get a bad health report from the inspectors last week?
On issues like this, the Twittersphere will swirl with rumours. But social media will never be reliable on its own.
Someone has to do some fact checking.
The Herald has built a great reputation for trying to get it right (and for apologising when it gets it wrong) over 170 years.
In the era of digital hyperlocal news, the skills and ability to sort fact from fiction are going to be what keeps The Herald relevant and essential.
The ability to capture local conversations, and mediate where necessary (usually by injecting facts) is where local digital media is heading.
And while local democracy is helped by carefully checked facts, fairly reported, the appetite for fresh local news is not limited to politics. People will also pay (a little) for local gossip, reviews of services, and for knowledge about local threats, including crime.
Will The Herald be around in 170 years time?
If it can embrace and invest in hyperlocal reporting and quality investigative journalism, focus on its social media reach and seek a new role as journalism-as-conversation moderators and curators, the answer is likely to be a big digital yes.