The players

Paul Bass sent me a good synopsis of various citizens/hyperlocal projects. The list at The Media Center is also comprehensive, but this one (in the continuation) provides some detail on the varying business and content models for newcomers to the whole concept.

UPDATE: Ken Sands also has an overview and is impatient with the MSM's adoption rate.

Here are some models of experiments in online hyperlocal news sites. 

● The old-fashioned town news model. In the

Westport

case, a retired CBS newsman does reporting, then fields tons of photos and captions from citizens. His site has made a big splash in town; it’s the main source of news for people involved or interested in civic affairs.

http://www.westportnow.com/

 http://h2otown.info/

http://www.kenttribune.com/

yonkers.tribune.com

 

● The link-to-everything model. This guy’s raking in local ads—and getting lots of traffic—in an upstate

New York

town where everyone hates the daily. He’s not a conventional journalist. He does no reporting. But he is a journalist of sorts, or a “convener,” enabling the reader to find all sorts of info, from births and deaths in town to city council agendas to breaking TV news reports on car crashes… I called it the anarchic model, at least in terms of design! There’s an exuberance to it…

http://www.newzjunky.com/ 

● The savvy, personality-driven, higher-quality-writing but small-town-news-feel model. This is my favorite so far, I think:

 http://www.baristanet.com/ 

● The quality-journalism model, with real reporting, analysis, quality design, links to groups wrestling with the big ideas, plus all the goodies the Internet offers (two-way communication). They’ve already done an awesome series on meth, sex, and the underground economy. This is a regional, not a hyperlocal site; but its approach offers a good model for the quality that the hyperlocal sites can achieve, too.

http://newwest.net/

 

● The not-for-profit model. In the first case, foundations gave tons of money for an NYC experiment in all forms of how the web can do journalism in new ways: neighborhood-by-neighborhood forums on civic issues; links to think tanks; news reporting and citizen reporting in neighborhoods; filtering through the masses of copy produced everywhere else everyday about boroughs of New York, to give readers one-click access…

http://www.gothamgazette.com/

The other not-for-profit is a site funded by the Columbia Journalism Review, giving its students a real site on which to produce NYC news, and to incorporate audio, another promise of web publishing…

http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/

 

● The citizen-journalist model, local: A popular Brattleboro, Vermontsite invites everyone to contribute articles in areas they care about. This tends to be narrower, not geographically, but ideologically … But it’s heavily used, and the way people choose to report stories can be kind of interesting.

  http://www.ibrattleboro.com/

 

● The citizen-journalist model, over broad geographical terrain. This is the world’s number-one successful example of this model:

 http://english.ohmynews.com/

● The link-up-with-newspapers model. All dailies have web sites, which (with a few exceptions) are not innovative, which don’t have lots of separate investment. But in Bakersfield, California , a paper decided to start covering one region through the web. Citizens were invited to contribute the articles. Then once every two weeks they publish a popular newspaper with the best articles. The web site doesn’t earn much money; it produces the copy and citizen involvement. Then the biweekly paper produces the ad revenue.

http://www.northwestvoice.com/

 

●Tons of discussion of debate is going on over the web about how the new journalism should develop. Two sample sites:

http://dangillmor.typepad.com/

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/

 

 

Here’s an upcoming site that, based on what’s written here, may be closest:

 http://blog.pegasusnews.com/

Comments

[Lisa Williams]

Hey! Thanks for linking (I run http://h2otown.info">h2otown.info).

The blog group at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard (they're nice enough to lend us a conference room) which I'm a regular at, is going to be having a session on citizen journalism next Thursday at 7PM. We've got streaming audio and IRC chat, so you can both listen and talk back from the comfort of your own couch, bandwith permitting.

Here's some more info about the session: http://www.cadence90.com/wp/?p=3732

[Lisa Williams]

PS. I agree with you about Baristanet. It was one of my big inspirations, along with universalhub.com.
As I go on, my hope is to merge the two forms -- snarky fun (but not mean) local coverage but also, my site has everything that's needed to let anyone who wants to try to contribute their own news stories.

It's based on the same software as BlufftonToday.com. (And have you seen Phillyfuture.org?)

[Debbie Galant]

Glad to be included in the roundup, as the favorite no less, and interesting to see all the entrants. When are we going to have a convention?

[Barry Parr]

I publish Coastsider , a news site for coastal San Mateo County, a rural area smack-dab in the middle of one of the biggest media markets in the US.

[Mike Orren]

Welcome all. To be clear, the list was created by Paul Bass, whom I referenced at the top. Otherwise, I can assure you, our vaporlaunch wouldn't have rated so high.

And Debbie, I did hear something about some sort of impromptu wedia convention, perhaps in San Francisco. I'll post about it if I hear more.

[Bill Densmore]

To the question of a conference -- we're looking at developing a track for local news communities at The Media Giraffe Project's first conference in Amherst, Mass., between June 29 and July 2, 2006.

-- bill densmore