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Hyperlocal day at Northwestern

12 comments on Hyperlocal day at Northwestern

Hyperlocal day at Northwestern
: I’m going to be at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism (my, ahem, alma mater) to begin a project with Rich Gordon’s management students to investigate the potential of hyperlocal content in towns.

I’d love to have your ideas.

The hope is that the students will go into a pilot town and find that there is untold wealth of local information that can be brought together to serve a community: content of, by, and for the people.

You know I’m already working to start hyperlocal blogs. But we need much more. We need to encourage more people to blog on their own or on our sites (we just held MeetUps in two towns to start spreading seeds); we want to see more viewpoints and more information from more communities. We need to gather local government information from meetings and officials. We need to see what school information is out there. We hope to get video that’s already being shot of meetings and sporting events. What information can be scraped and blogged and linked to?

Any ideas? What’s happening in your town? What sources of useful local information can you name? What information do you want?

12 responses to “Hyperlocal day at Northwestern”

  1. MattS Avatar
    MattS

    Restaurant reviews, neighborhood nooks and crannies, coverage of local events.

  2. Jeff Sharlet Avatar
    Jeff Sharlet

    That sounds great, but how about “hyperlocal content” (aka, stories) that go deeper than the blow-by-blow of local government, business, etc.? Blogs shouldn’t blind us to publishing potential of the web inherent in webzines consisting of articles composed over a period of time, with real thought. Seems as if webzines are almost old media now, but they have greater democratic potential than blogs, which tend toward the reactive.
    A friend of mine, Michael Lesy, was inspired by the old New Deal FSA documentary projects to create a site for his Hampshire College students, Living Now (http://livingnow.hampshire.edu/). Local documentary by amateurs. Some of it “news,” some of it ordinary life looked at through a sort of pop ethnographic lens. Blogs do this to some extent, but why limit ourselves? What if municipalities created documentary websites locals could contribute to? In depth news, real stories.

  3. Ellen Dana Nagler Avatar
    Ellen Dana Nagler

    I am doing a project with the Santa Barbara County Action Network to give them a robust, interactive web presence, and help in decentralizing their management structure. They serve as an umbrella for a number of progressive groups, cover city council meetings, school boards, county supervisor meetings, advocate for and report on a range of issues. But there are substantial differences, even rifts, between north and south county. We hope to create dialog, help factions to arrive at consensus through vigorous but not rancorous debate. And that’s only for starters.
    I strongly believe that we can generate force, maintain a sense of urgency, and continue the good work of the Dean and Clark Movements by working from the outside — in local/regional arenas. This is a bellwether project.

  4. Michael Froomkin Avatar
    Michael Froomkin

    There is already a big infrastructure in place for hyperlocal news. See Out2.com (I’m a director of the company.)
    The company anchors by giving free tools to schools. It pays for this by creating a geographically and subject targeted environment attractive to both national and very small local advertisers.

  5. button Avatar
    button

    I really do not like being negative, but I am very pessamistic about the potential of your hyper-local idea, especially vis a vis NJ.
    Obviously, this is one of the key reasons why I am moving out of NJ after having lived here for 50+ yrs.
    I have an EXTREMELY low regard for the people who run NJ as well as the people who live in it.
    Ultimately, this has further caused me to rethink some previously facile presumptions about American concepts.
    And here’s a peculiar case: due to the quirks of the American legal system we cannot mention the name of this family, but they are “the neighbors from Hell.”
    -Every few years some aspect of their always-ongoing legal hassles surfaces in the NJ news media. Few people living outside NJ know who they are. Residents of NJ often do know who they are. Hint: it is NOT Mary Higgins Clark in Saddle River– just so you know.
    -The mother of the family is a famous writer. She had an unwanted child. They have always had a very stormy, quasi-public relationship of the kind a family has to have a lot of money to be unhappy with. Poor families act out their unhappinesses in other ways.
    -At least some of their troubles are due to living in NJ. Some of these (very serious) problems wouldn’t happen elsewhere.
    I intend to move as far away from NJ as I can.

  6. sheila Avatar
    sheila

    One of my concerns about hyperlocal blogs has always been that they’ll devolve into “neighbors from hell” rants — complaints about the people with the uncut lawn, condo-like pressure to conform, the “Harper Valley PTA” stuff.
    And while I’d love to be able to ask for recommendations of doctors, etc., that could open the gates to some nasty legal actions if horror stories unfold. From another direction, maybe I’d only get infomercials disguised as experiences.
    Any thoughts on how to overcome these obstacles?

  7. jack driscoll Avatar
    jack driscoll

    Emphasize content? How radical.
    Kudos to Medill, Gordon, Jarvis.
    Might I suggest deploying teens and seniors to form community publishing groups (see http://www.ojr.org/ojr/technology/1071702097.php)
    Their perspectives would complement blogs and create quite a hyperbuzz.
    The 5-year-old Junior Journal and the 8-year-old SilverStringers certainly are models. Then there are the 4500 junior and senior high “newspapers” published in a section called LaFragola on LaRepubblica’s site in Italy at http://www.kataweb.it
    What we need are new models–and more of them. jack driscoll

  8. Sam Anthony Avatar
    Sam Anthony

    Anyone interested in this subject “HyperLocal”, give me a call. We have been extremely successful at this while remaining well under the radar screens of the major media. My number is
    8 0 0 – 3 5 8 – 0 1 8 7 .
    I Love talking to people that share our vision and understand the evolutionary process we are living

  9. button Avatar
    button

    You are attracting some impressive links to this thread. While I am happy to note their existences, they are much more optimistic than I.
    Be that as it may, it is worth mentioning again, as I have mentioned here once in while previously, that the BBC has been doing at least two projects in this field. I find myself often quite fascinated by our similarities and subtle differences.
    Communities have life cycles. A town or county may be newly developed, regenerated, or a “graying” area. But not all communities have equal resources. And the resources are not entirely contingent on their financial assets. NJ also has a phenom of large numbers of residents who are technically literate, but simply don’t function that way– and don’t want to. And that’s one of the reasons they are reverting back to the jungle.

  10. No Avatar
    No

    Well the great ideas you and Newhouse can profit from just keep rolling in. Stop by the Chuck Heston Theater over at the drama school while you’re there…maybe some of the philanthropy of the Chuckster will rub off on you…dip into the millions and fund the Michael Moore Chair at Medill…unless that one’s already been paid for by your mates at the Kerry machine.

  11. Chuck Olsen Avatar
    Chuck Olsen

    Here in the Twin Cities, we’re in the midst of a transit strike. Behold, Strike Blog.
    On my own blog, I posted about the bulldozing of Apache Plaza, America’s second mall which happens to hold a few childhood memories. Before I know it, people in my community are having a conversation with the new developer (who is putting in a Walmart) on my blog. It was really quite amazing.

  12. Trudy W. Schuett Avatar
    Trudy W. Schuett

    The Yuma County IT manager, Matt McClymonds, is considering using blogs for updates on charitable events which before used up a lot of space on his server in e-mail.
    Any local event, such as the County Fair or United Way fund drive, can use a blog to report progress or provide information the local Big3 media can’t completely cover. Participants can post their details, i.e., “The Community Theatre is presenting Our Town at 4 p.m. on Tuesday. Starring former Rodeo Queen Jane Doe.” “4-H members are winning most of the blue ribbons for prize cattle.”
    That sort of thing.
    I also thought about people like the County Board of Supervisors using blogs to inform the community what they’re working on. One Supervisor already has a monthly luncheon for constituents, so this would allow those not free to attend a scheduled meeting to be informed and also put in their two cents’ worth.