Hyperlocal - Backfence vs 101

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Hyperlocal - Backfence vs 101

I have always been interested in the idea that the web can be a platform for user generated news and information about local communities.

Back in 1996 we spent some time with Frank Daniels and his company Koz which was building a platform to transform local community news. The idea that moms and dads could create better and more timely information about the kids' soccer game (and much more) was and is a very powerful idea.

Koz was too early and the enterprise software model wasn't right either. But the vision was spot on and it is going to happen someday.

Fast forward ten years and we have the second wave in full bloom. I have spent time looking at two interesting projects, Greensboro101 in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Backfence in Northern Virginia. I am sure there are other similar projects and I'd love to hear from you all about them.

Both of these projects are live in multiple cities. 101 is in Charlotte and Nashville in addition to Greensboro, where it started.

Backfence, which launched this week, is live in Reston and McLean Virginia.

I want to congratulate both Mark and Susan from Backfence and Roch Smith from 101 for getting these projects off the ground. They are doing important work and I am sure that I am not the only one paying attention.

With the collapse of newspaper classifieds and their movement online, there is a real possibility that local community papers will not survive in their current incarnation. I wrote a bit about this in my whither newspapers post from last month.

So if the local newspaper folds, where will people go to get their information? I suspect its going to be something like 101 or Backfence. A low cost community driven news and information service. Think about it? Would you rather have some guy getting paid to write restaurant reviews or would you rather read the best bloggers in town's reviews of them with user supplied ratings ala Zagat? Would you rather get the local paper's view of the new high school cost overruns or hear everyone in town's opinions and be able to debate them?

Some will say the Citysearch and other local web services are already doing this. I don't think so. Citysearch and most of the local web is about listings. There isn't any community and there isn't any news. So they don't offer a replacement experience for the local newspaper and that is what is going to be needed in many communities around the country.

This is not going to happen overnight. It requires a behavior change that is pretty fundamental. And it requires a revenue stream. For that we have Google local and Yahoo! local to hope for. They are almost certainly going to take their contextual ad networks local and if they don't, others will. I think the revenue piece of this puzzle will solve itself fairly early in the development of this market.

The product is more complicated. And that is why I am watching Backfence and 101 so closely. Each brings something to the mix that I like. But neither is exactly what I want.

Backfence is pretty close to the look and feel that I would expect and want from a local news and information resource. It feels right to me. It's got color and pictures and an editorial driven layout that makes sense.

101 is more automated and the look and feel is less pleasing. But 101 does something that I think is absolutely critical. It aggregates its content from people who are already blogging on their own. It grabs that content and aggregates it and features it. It does not require that people come to 101 to post their content. I think that is the right model for a truly scaleable local platform.

So I don't think either Backfence or 101 has got it right yet. But that's fine. The essence of starting a business is to create something, get it into customers hands, and evolve the product. That's what both of these groups will do. And of course, there are others who are either doing this already (again, send me the links), or will do it soon.

Is this a venture fundable opportunity? In time, certainly. Is it too early right now? Probably. But this is an area worth watching closely and I will be doing that.

And if I were in North Carolina, Tenesee, or Northern Virginia, I'd be reading these sites daily and contributing pictures and words and lots of other stuff too.

May 5, 2005 Venture Capital and Technology | Comments (20) | TrackBack (9)

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» A VC Looks into Community Newspaper Developments from The Story of One Man
I do agree with Fred that Backfence is more aesthetically pleasing, but the aggregating feature of greensboro101 provides for more scalability. It will definitely be the meshing of the two that will become the dominant trait in the future. It look... [Read More]

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Comments

A thought that comes to mind is quality control. A similar experiment in Istanbul disappeared because it turned into a shouting match between fans of rival soccer teams. Think of how Backfence would play out in Odessa, TX, when it came to coverage of local high school football.

Posted by: Cem Sertoglu | May 5, 2005 9:36:17 AM

Another newspaper website that is taking a similar direction is www.blufftontoday.com.

TopiX.net is another aggregator source for communities in general, but it pulls more from tradional media outlets.

Posted by: Andy | May 5, 2005 9:55:28 AM

Another good example of this is in Vancouver BC: Urban Vancouver.

Posted by: AhBook | May 5, 2005 10:59:11 AM

Interesting ... we've had one of these in Westport for at least a couple of years ... www.westportnow.com, which does not appear to be affiliated with either of our town's two weekly print publications. But it doesn't have the glitz and depth of the sites that you linked to. I wonder whether there is enough of a revenue opportunity for a town the size of Westport, which only has a population of 25,000 or so, or whether you'd have to cover a bigger area.

Posted by: JayR | May 5, 2005 10:59:59 AM

It's important to look at local news sites that don't take the form of companies, too; the barrier to entry for this is really, really low, and that's something the for-profit sites will have to contend with.

How do I know? I run a hyperlocal site for Watertown, MA, where anybody can submit stories, and everybody who signs up gets their own weblog, and it has the ability to aggregate other local blogs. The whole thing costs me $40 a month. With Google Ads it basically pays for itself.

Funny, five years ago, it was a big deal to have your own blog, now it's trivial to set up a system where you can become a blog host for other people. (I use a hosted Drupal service called Bryght. Drupal is a blogging and community management system).

I've been compiling a list of hyperlocal news sites on del.icio.us: Localnewsapalooza.

JayR: WestportNow is really a great site, you're lucky to have it.

One of my suppositions is that it might be that the day of the economically healthy local newspaper for anything but a major media market was a blip. Where I live, area local papers have been cut to the bone.

In the future, volunteer media might be the only viable media for towns like mine. That's okay, volunteer fire departments still put out fires pretty good :)

Posted by: Lisa Williams | May 5, 2005 11:24:14 AM

Companies like Blogads are already doing some targeted ad network initiatives, too.

Posted by: Lisa Williams | May 5, 2005 11:25:30 AM

Thanks Lisa for mentioning Bryght! Our showcase site for Bryght is Urban Vancouver (Vancouver, BC, Canada not Washington!) which gives a free blog (all posts are published to the front page) and image gallery to all Vancouverites AND aggregates all Vancouver related RSS feeds (approximately 300 at the moment). Urban Vancouver is about a year old and has 400 citizen journalists, bloggers and people who just want to express themselves!

Bryght, like CivicSpace, BlufftonToday and PhillyFuture uses Drupal open source software.

And the cool thing is with Bryght, you can create your own. In fact, I just wrote a how to called Create Your Own Personal Urban Vancouver

Posted by: Roland Tanglao | May 5, 2005 12:18:09 PM

Thanks for the review, Fred and the thoughtful critisizm. Greensboro101 has, from the very start, evolved based on user feedback. Five months ago, it looked a lot different.

You're suggestions will make our continued evolution even more compelling.

Posted by: Roch101 | May 5, 2005 2:44:31 PM

Here are a few more:

http://www.yourhub.com/

http://www.j-newvoices.org/

One of the challenges with these types of efforts is getting them to a point where they can generate enough revenue to pay some folks to do things like keeping the streets safe and well lit.

User generated content continues to be a tough thing to associate with advertising. When I was at Trellix we spend a lot of time and effort on detecting porn and other abuses.

If you are trying to build a sustainable media business you need to constently produce a quality product both for the reader and the advertiser. Seems pretty obvious but it gets lost on people rushing to cash in on AdSense.

Posted by: Myron Kassaraba | May 5, 2005 2:48:21 PM

cyber journalist has one of the more comprehensive
lists of citizen reporting initiatives, covering most of the sites listed here.

NowPublic
launched its first beta a few weeks ago and is developing a technology platform to empower citizen journalists. Our goal is to allow you to see every step of the story development process as it unfolds and enable individuals to work together creating in-depth coverage of events from the hyperlocal to the global. NowPublic is a repository of creative commons licensed content that bloggers et. al. can use on their own sites - and with our SmartMedia technology, multimedia content creators are assured intellectual-property protection, the required attribution, and a viral promotional vehicle for their work through which people can contact them or license/purchase high-resolution versions, request more work, etc.

Posted by: Michael Meyers | May 5, 2005 4:23:51 PM

All news is hyper local

The old saying is that ‘all news is local’. The Internet hasn’t changed this truth but it has changed what is now a viable news story. What’s happening now is less about technology and more about economics. The simple fact is that news got cheap. For every one mainstream media reporter, there are potentially thousands of people with camera phones and blogs who know the local terrain better than anyone parachuting in from the closest bureau.

When financial pressures require editorial content to satisfy the widest possible audience for the lowest possible cost, answering these questions is easy because news can be expressed mathematically: how expensive is this to cover and how many people will read this?

By contrast the resources in the citizen journalism sphere are practically unlimited. Reporters cover stories that affect their neighborhoods, communities of interest, even smaller social circles. Is a PTA meeting news? A protest in front of the neighborhood bank? A benefit concert at the high school? A fish kill? A rent dispute? . Readers seek out these stories and often add their own coverage. The new economics mean that news is defined as anything people care about.

But the big opportunity is in rolling out hyper local news, globally. Whether it’s a bomb blast at the British consulate, the Schiavo story in Florida or a Papal funeral, all news is now hyper local.

Posted by: Michael Tippett | May 5, 2005 4:31:35 PM

Here's a traditional newspaper that seems to get it right. Check out www.austin360.com. Take a quick look at it, and you'd almost forget that it is run by our stodgy print paper the Austin American-Statesman. Really a nice "what's happening" guide around town...but I wish the A-AS folks would stop calling me once every three days with a sales pitch. I read it online!

Posted by: Steve | May 5, 2005 5:36:32 PM

I feel Roland's efforts at Bryght are very important: they show just how far barriers have gone down and infrastructures have gone up that enable anyone with little technical know how, or money, to start a site these capabilities.

I run an effort in Philadelphia named Philly Future (http://www.phillyfuture.org) on a related toolset (CivicSpace) that Bryght provides - and I have ran it with a small team of volunteers for a very, very long time now (various incarnations since 1999 - community aggregator since January 2004 - open participation since mid 2004).

We feature the headlines of over a 100 regional blogs and feeds, and encourage direct, original works to be published to the site - it's an effort to provide service to our community much like that of the other great sites mentioned here. Very similar to the 101s (which I love as Roch knows), but with a slightly different model: While we provide a river of news aggregator - the focus for us is editorializing our regional web - their focus is a pure representation of the community via it's river of news.

It's great to see so many other efforts exploring this space now. It recalls the Sidewalk/Digital Cities/RealCities portals larger companies pursued a few years back. A huge difference this time is the flow reversal: It's the communities themselves who are being empowered to determine what is the news and become collective owners of these sites.

Compliments to NowPublic as well - they are helping explore and build the infrastructure for distributed journalism.

Posted by: Karl | May 6, 2005 6:35:13 AM

Roch has done a great job with 101-- I appalude him and the entire 101 editorial board-- but think another Greensboro resident, TheShu of TriadBlogs.com, GreensboroIsTalking.com, (his blog) and BlogsByCity.com should get mentioned as well.

Posted by: Billy The Blogging Poet | May 6, 2005 7:23:16 AM

Although not the main thrust of your post, I found your comments on reviews -whose judgment do we trust more, a paid "expert" or our peers- interesting and posted some followup on the different review models I see: Editorial reviews, user reviews, user reviews anointed as official, and automatically aggregated review. I am interested in folks' opinions on these different models from both a value and cost perspective.

Posted by: Roy Rodenstein | May 11, 2005 11:27:39 AM

We have been doing a Santa Barbara "hyperlocal" for the last 18 months. Doc Searls called us, "possibly the best local online journal in the whole country." We would love to hear your comments.

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Posted by: Astuce | Dec 6, 2005 6:27:11 AM

We are trying the hyperlocal experiment here in the Poconos with a side project off our weekly alternative paper. Pocono Herald is an experiment in web publishing and citizen journalism. http://www.poconoherald.com

Posted by: Chad Pensiero | Jun 13, 2006 5:33:16 PM

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