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Hyper local!

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Moderator1, Jul 29, 2008.

  1. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    I did my share of prepubescent Little League, hated every minute of it but my boss at least shared my pain. He hated having to assign the stuff and was as ecstatic as I was when the gamer I filed was of our local team being eliminated from districts/regionals/whatever. That made it at least tolerable. I have great sympathy for previous posters who worked for people who actually were root, root, rooting for the home team.
     
  2. forever_town

    forever_town Well-Known Member

    Perhaps this isn't the place to discuss hyper local as an industry-wide sentiment? Granted, there are some papers that have to go hyper local because they can't compete with the big shops in national news.

    Mine, for instance is a local weekly. We wouldn't be trying to chase down stories about funding the Iraq War or whether the surge is working. We only carried a story about Jesse Jackson speaking on the sub prime mortgage crisis because he went to a house in my county to address the issue.

    Surely in the case of a paper like mine, hyper local is a better bet than trying to go national. Or does the concept not work at all?
     
  3. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    Screw that. I did write that story back in the day.
     
  4. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    Worked for our start-up in N.H. All (hyper) local weekly. Went from start-up to just under 10K in 4 years -- and there was the 50-year-old daily right down the street competing for the same readers. Covered everything local. People loved it. I covered everything, right down to fifth-grade soccer games (those were rare, and most times just a long graph complementing 3-4 photos). Working there were four of my favorite years in the biz.
     
  5. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    The concept can work, and in the case of small papers, it must. Local news in small papers' bread and butter. Thing is, you need a mix sometimes. You don't want a daily paper's sports section to run the Super Bowl as a brief while little Johnny's JV basketball team gets the lead headline. There are some papers that don't understand that.
     
  6. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    Glad you brought up the Super Bowl thing. One of my favorite things during Super Bowl two-week was a full page of predictions. I opened the phone book to a random page and plopped my index finger down and called that number. Did that, oh, 100 times or so. Called the person, chatted a bit, got their prediction, and it was great fun. Not only that, some of the people I called had athletic ties to the communities we covered going back 25-30-40 years. Just one example how you can hyper-local a national event. The daily paper in town took care of the Super Bowl AP stories and whatnot. As a hyper-local, I needed to do something different.
     
  7. Tom Petty

    Tom Petty Guest

    yeah, dixie. good stuff ... if you're lilly white.
     
  8. StraightEdge

    StraightEdge Guest

    Tangent ... grew up in the South, played Dixie League, don't remember a single black kid.

    Anyway, I'm lucky enough to have management with this attitude: Fuck it. Nothing under high school varsity. We've got a strong JUCO in town and a D-I FBS school only 100 miles away.

    ME once told me, "If I wanted this shit in the paper, I'd get rid of you and have the parents write it for free."
     
  9. calibretto

    calibretto Member

    i want that ME at my paper.
     
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