I went over to Walsall in the West Midlands last night to attend the Black Country Social Media Cafe. Part of this was to see how they do it over there to feed into the Derbyshire Social Media Cafe but also it’s fantastic to meet up to talk about online with people (yes, enjoy the irony that we all want to talk face-to-face about online stuff).
There was lots of good chats but one that really got me thinking happened on the street as we tried to bid our good-nights. We started talking about hyperlocal, something which has been in the periphery of my vision but I haven’t looked directly at yet.
What is hyperlocal? It is information and data published about a specific community and living in that community. It might be aggregated news stories about that community, blogging, images – anything really that reflects or comments on life in the community.
It is an interesting subject for me as it potentially comes into contact with my two areas of professional interest – local government and local journalism – so I was glad to get the chance to chat about it.
The conversation between myself, @danslee and @theyamyam continued to explore some of the potential for hyperlocal bloggers that Dan looked at in his post about how local gov PR should deal with the movement. We talked about how newspapers were changing, or failing to change, in the face of online and our own experiences of journalism. This lead onto a discussion about the Northcliffe Group’s hyperlocal pilot scheme.
The Local People network of hyperlocal sites (currently in beta) for the South West of England is about ‘Your place. Your people.’ and encourages members to join groups, find out about their community and read and write local news. It deals specifically with communities with populations between 10,000 and 50,000 with has 36 portals online at the moment.
How does this project support the local newspaper business? Well, presumably they can feed their own local news, business directories and classifieds into the portal and sell advertising against that. Allowing the community to contribute also means they have a beat reporter in all these locations – a set-up they haven’t directly employed for some time. There is clearly a market here that local newspapers would want to tap.
And local government? Well, with initiatives like ‘cohesive communities’ and generally trying to make people as happy with the place they live in as possible supporting them with hyperlocal would be beneficial. @theyamyam expressed his belief that hyperlocal communities naturally spring up around the local council as they deal with the business of being a resident and so much of the content is about services for residents, the business of the council.
This is probably pretty accurate for urban or suburban areas where the geographical area covered by a council can be quite tight. It may be less so in rural areas where county and district council’s often have large geographical areas containing a number of disparate communities. In these areas perhaps hyperlocals would spring up more around the parish or town councils, or perhaps communities we wouldn’t define in any traditional sense will emerge.
If local government does start looking at hyperlocal will they look to enable through training and support or deliver more along the lines of Local People? Certainly local councils already hold a lot of hyperlocal information – from directories of groups and organisations, events, news and services.
Most councils probably aren’t enabling or delivering at the moment. A low percentage have RSS on their websites for key areas such as press releases and meetings so existing hyperlocals can’t make use of this information easily. The press offices also may need to evolve, as @danslee explored in his post, to consider and converse with local bloggers in the same way they have and do with the traditional media.
It’s certainly an interesting area filled with vibrant, creative, passionate bloggers. If you want to explore some examples look to The Yam Yam or The Lichfield Blog or take a look through the directory of ultralocal blogs that Matt Wardman is compiling.
Our discussion of hyperlocal led to talk of the need to move, especially for local government online, away from pulling people to our websites and toward making our information available for them to pull into their own online space, be it a blog, iGoogle or another network. But that’s another story, for another day…
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Try checking out peuplade.fr – I understand this is a thriving hyperlocal community / news site in france.
Thanks Mark – I will take a look 🙂
That’s a great post, Sarah. Really glad you could come across and visit the Black Country Social Media Cafe.
Everyone is still getting their heads around hyperlocals, it’s fair to say. Even those that are doing it.
It’s amazing where sites such as this have taken off. It could be a town, a village, a housing estate or a tower block. But in order for hyperlocals to really work I can’t help but think that smaller surely has to be better. They can fill the gap brilliantly that newspapers don’t.
With that in mind they are absolutely tailor made for parishes and housing estates. It’s all about having a group of people with a common set of interests but not too big or too small. It can be the parish magazine online, for example.
It’ll be interesting to see how councils respond to them.
A hyperlocal blog may be a really good way for a community to stay in touch with a regeneration project on a particular estate, for example….
Sarah, a very interesting and thought-provoking post, thank you.
I was there last night but had to dash off a bit early so didn’t really have a chance to chat with you. You might like to check out my website ‘The Bloxidge Tallygraph’ which is part ‘hyperlocal community newspaper’, part blog and part local history magazine for Bloxwich and district.
Bloxwich is a large village/small town within Walsall Metropolitan Borough and has a very distinct identity. Although administered by Walsall Council, Bloxwich people have always upheld the difference of the village from Walsall, and there is a rivalry that goes back to the English Civil War and probably before. The ‘Tallygraph’ is basically me doing my bit for the local community.
By the way, ‘Bloxidge Tallygraph’ is old Black Country for ‘Bloxwich Telegraph’, the name derives from a scurrilous local news-sheet of the 1870s.
See: http://www.thebloxidgetallygraph.com
Cheers,
Stuart Williams
@TheTallygraph
Oh, and here is a great link to a Guardian piece by Sarah Hartley (@foodiesarah).
http://sarahhartley.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/journalists-bloggers-citizens-who-are-these-people/#comment-961
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on hyperlocal Sarah. We are just starting a project in rural Cambridgeshire to explore using social media to improve community cohesion. It’s so helpful to keep getting different perspectives on what hyperlocal means to local authorities, especially as I didn’t get to TAL09 and we don’t have a social media café (yet!). I will no doubt be blogging once our project gets started.
I completely agree that providing content of value to communities is something local authorities can do, as well as providing training and support (which we already do for general IT/internet skills). For example we have a community website http://www.cambridgeshire.net and have been developing widgets and feeds that can be plugged into community sites or partner sites.
Thanks Stuart – sorry we didn’t get to chat, maybe at a future BCSMC!
I’ll certainly take a look at the Tallygraph as another example of Hyperlocal. I’ve started investigating what is about in Derbyshire but it seems quite thin on the ground at the moment! However, all this talk of hyperlocal has given me the idea to have a session on it at a future Derby/shire Social Media Cafe so watch this space (well, this space – http://socialmediacafe.org.uk actually)!
Thanks Michele,
I’d be interested to know how you get on with this as my own thoughts are running along the lines of cohesion in rural communities! Sounds like we may be taking a similar path.
I’ll also check out Cambridgeshire.net as it sounds like a really useful resource for the community.
Thanks Dan – really pleased to have been welcomed to the BCSMC! It was useful (and enjoyable) to come over and chat with you guys.
Hyperlocal is something I am definitely going to make the time to look at further as I think there is certainly a place for local councils and huge benefits to getting these blogs / websites going for each community.