The next miracle (v11.1): Owen Youngman

Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill / Northwestern

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Category Archives: Business of media

Local Fourth sees a hyperlocal future: Part I

Back in the fall of 1996, I was immersed in publishing hyperlocal news on the Internet. I just didn’t know it.

Digital City Evanston logo

That was then (1996). Click to see the whole home page.

As you might suspect, a principal reason I didn’t know is that, inside Chicago Tribune Digital Publishing, we were calling Digital City Arlington Heights and Digital City Evanston something else: “virtual communities.” (Why? Because our 1995 strategic planning documents had called them that.) In fact, the word “hyperlocal” had yet to appear in either the Tribune or the New York Times . . . and when it did, each paper first used it in a story about television news (NYT, 7/14/97; CT, 12/24/98).

Well, that was then. By now, across this great land of ours, tens of thousands of Web sites and blogs focusing on news and information at the neighborhood, community, or suburban level have arrived (and in many cases departed), fully embracing their hyperlocalness. (Hmm. “Blogs.” Another coinage that hadn’t made the Tribune yet by then, although in researching this post I found an amazingly prescient piece about them by Julia Keller in September of 1999 that’s worth a detour.) Tens of millions of dollars have been expended to build these hyperlocal sites; some fraction of that amount has even been recouped in advertising.

And still the impetus to build new ones, operate them, and change the course of hyperlocal history has never been stronger, if we are to judge by the Patches and Triblocals of this world. So this quarter’s Community Media / Interactive Innovation Project course at Medill, with financial support from the Chicago Community Trust, took as its charge to research, understand, and propose new paths for hyperlocal news, technology, content, and advertising.  Medill Professor Rich Gordon has led the effort; now, as the quarter is nearing an end, the results and the recommendations are starting to roll in.

This is now (2010).

Not that I’m going to give away (yet) the innovations that these 15 graduate journalism students have created and are in the process of promulgating.  I will, however, tell you that

  • The blog they’ve been writing all quarter, localfourth.com, is already full of insights, ideas, and epiphanies.
  • The business and revenue team that I have been advising has published its “cookbook” of ideas for hyperlocal publishers interested in seeing their sites become financially sustainable.  You can read it on Scribd, read about it on localfourth, or download it through their webform.
  • You can watch the site for their full final report, coming soon.
  • You can get ready to put their ideas for a hyperlocal Web site to the test when it reaches public beta, soon.
  • And finally, if you are intrigued enough by any of the above, you can hear their final presentation at 5 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 9, in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum on Northwestern’s Evanston campus.

(Oh, why “Local Fourth”? As the site’s “About” page puts it, “Our name, Local Fourth, is an attempt to localize the ‘fourth estate’ — a reference to newspapers and community members serving a watchdog role.”)

I realized as I was getting ready for this quarter that I have been involved in some form of hyperlocal news in the Chicago area for nearly 30 years now, going back to a stint overseeing prep sports at the Suburban Trib at the beginning of the 1980s, continuing through a tour of duty as suburban editor of the Tribune, launching 17 suburb-level Digital City sites in the mid- to late 1990s, and finally overseeing the launch of Triblocal and Triblocal.com before I departed Trib Tower for the ivory tower in 2008. That makes me especially excited by the work that has been done this quarter.

Or should I have said it makes me especially hyper?

The new order changeth, giving way to …

In looking back at his eventful years of control of Tribune Company, Sam Zell recently told the Fox Business Network that the main thing he wasn’t much prepared for . . . in addition to the collapse of the print advertising market, perhaps … was “the degree to which the media loves to cover the media . . . the kernel is, the media loves to cover the media more than anything and anyone else.”

Tribune TowerThis predilection of course has been much in evidence in recent days, starting with David Carr’s Page One takedown in the Oct. 6 New York Times of the “bankrupt” corporate culture of the mired-in-Chapter-11 enterprise. In turn, Tribune’s chief innovation officer and chief executive officer soon found themselves in the spotlight, then out of their jobs, and media both major and minor had plenty of material to fill their pages and programming. This morning (Nov. 2) came news that a few more executives from the ex-CEO’s claque were ankling from the Tower.

A side effect has been a temporarily thriving market in punditry, and that recently has been my principal direct connection to this story.  My dual identities as a Northwestern professor and as a 37-year Chicago Tribune veteran meant that, for a few days, I showed up so often on air that I was getting as many emails about having been spotted as I generally do about frozen Nigerian bank accounts.

The tasks I was undertaking felt a mite more complicated than you might think, if only because I felt a need to try to parse the organizational and cultural distinctions between Tribune Co. and its individual businesses (newspapers, TV stations, and so on), differences that weren’t being much mentioned (perhaps partly because they might clutter the story line?).  Reader/viewer/user confusion about this is nothing new, of course … a quarter-century of Cubs ownership by Tribune Co. demonstrates that point … and in general the responsibility for its existence lies not with the audience, but with their information sources. (Not that four TV gigs and a radio segment are gonna fix that.)

Mercifully, not all of these media appearances have been preserved for posterity.  But here are a couple:

On Oct. 21, I was on WBEZ’s morning program “Eight Forty Eight” with David Greising of the Chicago News Cooperative and host Alison Cuddy.  The primary topics were organizational culture, business results and prospects, and of course the recent departure of the Tribune CEO. The audio is 13 minutes long.

Two weeks earlier, on Oct. 7, I spent some time on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” with Thom Clark of the Community Media Workshop and ex-WGN Radio host Steve Cochran, being interviewed by Eddie Arruzza in the early days of what we all knew was a developing story. Cochran is particularly good here, I think. The video is about 16 minutes long.

With any luck, my next stint in the sideshow spotlight will be about some other topic. No need to stay tuned; let your RSS feed do the work.

Gee, Brain, what are we going to do tonight?

The topics and books that were the focus of my principal panel at this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest continue to compel the attention of writers, reviewers and journals.

Technology Panel, Printers Row Lit Fest, 6/13/2010
BookTV.org video of Printers Row technology panel

Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, for instance, held a highly complimentary review of Tom Bissell’s “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.” In the Business section, Steven Johnson took mild exception to some of the premises in Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” in a piece called “Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social.” And Carr’s busy blog, Rough Type, pointed me to the online version of the latest Nieman Reports, where Jack Fuller shares part of what he learned in researching and writing “What Is Happening to News” in a piece entitled “Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism.” (Nieman also includes a link to Chapter 6 of the book, one of those I’ve been teaching at Medill this past academic year.)

In short, we’re long on discussion of the impact of technology on our cognitive abilities; of the continuing evolution of narrative; and of the changes wrought in and on our culture by the various media revolutions of the past 20 years. You can get a flavor by watching (all or some of) C-SPAN’s 47-minute video from Printers Row, available by clicking on the photo at right.

I can’t end this particular linkfest without doubling back yet again to the NYT and its magazine cover story Sunday about a computer system that has been built to play “Jeopardy!” The interactive simulation that accompanies the online version was nearly as compelling as the article … enough so that I didn’t get distracted while playing it (nor, come to think of it, was I distracted while reading. This is a good sign). Watching “Jeopardy!” today after having read the piece was to be reminded of just how tricky those clues really are, and what a feat of programming it is to “teach” a machine to parse them out.

The Brain

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try to take over the world."

If I were so inclined, I suppose I could worry that by the time an IBM system is ready to have a real conversation with a human being, all the available humans will have, in Carr’s memorable construction, outsourced their memories to Google. For another day.