Wall Street Journal calls hyperlocal effort a "flop"

At least the WSJ isn't blasting the entire concept of hyperlocal, making it seem that even community rags should avoid it...

 

interesting example below (North Virginia power outage)

http://publishing2.com/2008/06/04/what-newspapers-still-dont-understand-about-the-web/

 

1.) If you'll read to the end, you'll see the author did not have his facts straight before writing.

2.) I love newspapers, but that's not where I'm going to look for weather news as it happens. The TV and radio stations have weather specialists on staff, and on radio news stations they check in every hour. I'm not looking to the newspaper for a traffic report, either.

 

What Curley did at Lawrence.com wasn't just sports. And, he had Adrian Holovaty doing programming magic with databases which at the time was far ahead of anything else. But that was a lifetime ago where the web is concerned, and Holovaty earlier left the WP. The MSM doesn't know or care what to do with his skill set.

 

The "weather page" is one of the biggest wastes of space IMO in any newspaper.

Do you need to know the temperature in Brussels or Cairo? Could you use the space taken by the weather map -- the outdated, offers little information weather map -- for something else? Couldn't you just give a brief, short weather outlook on A-1 or A-2 and be done with it?


I like reading about traffic plans for the coming week, like detours or road construction and maybe even a little graphic showing closings and detours.

But I damn sure am not going to go to the Internets for a traffic update or, even worse, to watch a video of some moron standing beside a road with an $89 camera on a rickety tripod showing him talking about traffic.

Our local radio stations do a nice job with traffic updates during rush hour. That's good enough, immediate enough and brief enough for me.

 

He's leaving the Washington Post for Las Vegas.

 

1. Often the weather pages are sponsored by local ads -- often a TV station. So they are generating income.

2. Checking online for traffic actually works. You don't have to have someone standing on the side of the road with a camera. Most major cities have traffic camera installed that you can tap into. It's nice knowing that the interstate is blocked before you head out the door.

I have found that radio traffic is really worthless. By the time they talk about a wreck, it has long since been cleared up.

 

1). Yes, the writer did have it technically wrong, but the problem is that it's not about technicalities, it's about readers coming to your product to find something and not being able to find it easily. The reader isn't interested in splitting hair with you; they just want to be able to find the info easily. It's akin to when someone calls to complain that although you ran a game preview in the paper about the big local throwdown tonight, you didn't run the game time, and then you correct him by telling him: "The game time IS in the paper; it's listed on the agate page on C6." Yes, you would be technically correct, but you also didn't help your readers by not running the game time at a spot where they would most likely look (with the story), instead hiding it deep in the section and making them have to go find it.

That's the problem with what the Post did here. Tailoring the homepage based on login and reader customization is definitely helpful for readers for your normal, everyday news, but for a big story like this, and one where your content would be useful to many readers who might have to drive home in that storm, not making it highly visible on the global home page is inexcusable. Yes, I know that most of the traffic to washingtonpost.com is from out of area and from people looking for political news, but unless the Post has decided to stop covering non-political news in the Washington area, it's still a source, and a very reputable one at that, that people turn to for local news. They don't have to take down all the political news for the weather coverage, but for a paper of that size and reputation, it should be a very simple thing to add a highly visible element on the home page linking to the weather coverage deeper in the site (a strip across the top, a box at the top of one of the columns, etc.). Besides, the whole "click on the Local Washington Home Page" thing simply doesn't work. For one, that link is small and it's above where the real content starts, making it very easy to overlook. Two, it requires a login, and how many of you actually log in to read a news site if you don't have to? Besides, in a situation like this, the site likely would get a lot of views even from people who usually don't visit the site much and therefore not likely to have a login.

The sad part is that they actually did a pretty good job providing updates and info via that Capital Weather Gang blog, but the lack of global front-page presence made it more difficult to find. Maybe it happened due to a lack of communication between the people producing the coverage and the people maintaining the site, a lack of "Web thinking" on the part of the people running the site (big local storm = increased traffic to our site = let's make it easy for people to find that info), lack of manpower to update the front page quickly for breaking news, or lack of foresight when setting up the site design to build in features to quickly and easily accommodate such situations. Whatever the reason (and it doesn't matter why), the bottom line is it was a poor user's experience. If somebody comes to the site and can't find the info quickly, they'll probably think, "Oh, the Post doesn't have any info on this killer storm. Wow, that's pretty bad for what's supposed to be one of the top papers around." It hurts the paper and it hurts the readers.

2). Perhaps it's a generational thing, but I almost never turn to TV or radio for weather updates. For one thing, I don't have to wait through all the other stuff to get that 30-second weather tidbit. Also, if I'm at work, I don't have a TV or radio. I might go to their web sites, among others, during severe weather conditions, but in those cases, I would also definitely go to the newspaper's site because it is a local source and because its content tend to be more in-depth than TV or radio. In fact, although many people who consume news online now do it through aggregators and go directly to the story rather than go through the front door of the site, natural disasters are one situation where they would actually come to the web site's home page first because instead of waiting for that weather update to pop up on their RSS readers or sifting through 100 pages of Google results, they would probably find the info more quickly by going to a few sites that they think would most likely be covering the story. And the local newspaper is definitely one of the first that comes to mind. I see it as a good thing that people would come to the newspaper's site to look for updates on inclement weather, because it indicates that they think we have content they want. We just need to do a better job of proving them right.

 

Of course I was talking Web sites in all cases. You can't believe I was suggesting people in major storm were going to wait for the next day's paper or even the next hour's broadcast. The major point that you miss is that news radio and TV stations employ professional meterologists and cover weather regularly (and most large dailies don't), so of course I will turn to their sites first because their level of expertise is greater than that of a newspaper GA reporter who covered a three-alarm fire last night and is covering a storm today.

Stop it with the "generational thing." It's condescending and unthinking. All of us here are completely aware of all the new media platforms or we'd be pecking away at our Smith-Coronas instead of "social networking" here. We disagree about their potential and their best uses.

 

Hmm, I think I touched a nerve here. Frank, no need to be defensive. That "generational" thing wasn't directed toward you or anybody else. I just threw it out there and wasn't really even citing it as a definitive reason (I was basically saying, "I don't know, maybe it's this or that"). If that rubbed you the wrong way, I'll apologize. And perhaps I'm reading more into your comment than what's there, but it sounded like you think I've been hammering away on the generation divide idea, which I don't think I have. Perhaps you have evidence to the contrary.

I do have to disagree, however, that "all of us here are completely aware of all the new media platforms". From the discussions, it's obvious that's not the case.