The Hyperlocal News Newsletter is delivered weekly. It's the second chance to catch up on the links and articles that you ment to read this week, but didn't.
Who
For writers and publishers of independent online news ventures, like the ones listed in our hyperlocal news directory.
What
Links to the best articles, discussions and useful new tools. Hand picked and crap-filtered in order to save you time.
Where
In the web's orginal killer app: your email inbox.
When
Delivered each Saturday morning. You can open it whenever you want.
Why
Because you're busy churning out local news and feeding the Twitter and Facebook all day, and don't want to miss out on important news about your industry.
Check out past newsletters from the archive in this site's sidebar.
These are the stories I enjoyed this week and are all great examples of local news content. You know, content, the only thing about a hyperlocal news site that really matters.
Cone-ing: Apparently it's a thing, and it's happening in Hoboken, NJ.
Multi-space parking meter technology: Is coming to Red Bank, and now the folks there know.
Haunted Hospital to become senior housing: LA building last used as set for ghost hunting TV shows.
Lingering tension between public safty offices: Richmond, CA officials trying to work together.
Happy 350th Birthday: Nice little history lesson for the residents of Bensonhurst, who might not have known otherwise.
Occupy Tucson Evicted: Account of the events as they took place, from both sides.
Warm Weather: Sign of the times, as ducks take over an outdoor ice rink in Chicago.
School News: Part of a detailed series about underachievment in a weathly Lakeland, FL school system.
Football to help the Homeless: Story of pretty neat volunteer effort in Edinburgh.
Well done.
After an independent news publisher has the hang of editing, writing, sales, webmastering, and everything else that goes into a quality hyperlocal news site, they might start thinking about expanding.
Good reasons for this include building the brand, doing good in your community, or just banking some extra cash.
Here are a couple ready-built and slick ways to do it.
MindMixer
MindMixer is a platform offering Idea Collaboration for Better Communities.
Independent news site Noozhawk is a partner in a project using MindMixer as a public-engagement platform called Let's Talk Westside.
LocalWiki
Everyone knows about Wikis, with Wikipedia being the most famous community edited encyclopedia of everything.
LocalWiki is a new open-source, ready to install project designed to help build a local community encyclopedia.
ShopCity
The more entrepreneurial site owner can use their skills to help local businesses sell some stuff. ShopCity allows businesses to work together to connect with local customers.
Local publications like The Batavian in NY, and Magic City in Birmingham, AL have recently launched their own ShopCity marketplaces; ShopBatavia and ShopBirmingham.
Here's another social media button to add to your website, and it even looks useful for publishers and readers alike. Foursquare, the location based check-in service, has released a new feature, Save to Foursquare.
The idea would be to attach it to articles about specific places and businesses. If your reader is interested in visiting that location, they could click the button saving it to their Foursquare account. Then, the next time they are in the area, Foursquare would remind the reader that they were interested and that your site was where they read about it.
Of course, for any of this to work, the reader would have to be a Foursquare user with the application installed on their mobile device.
Magic Right?
Sounds like magic, but it requires a little effort on your part to get it working. First, your site will need to identify the place or business in a way that the application can understand. The best way is by using some metadata called an hCard. There are plenty of plugins avaliable to do this on your site, and it is a good practice anyway. To see how it works, try out the hCard Creator.
Real World Usage
Here's a screenshot from Time Out Chicago. Just a simple listing of name and address.
Thing to Consider
Do any of your readers use Foursquare? Check it out on this site with maps and statistics. It's very popular in many metropolitian areas, but determine for yourself if it would be worthwhile.
TV networks don’t just air Dancing With the Idols, or House’s Anatomy, whenever the producer brings in a finished tape. Think of the chaos!
No, they make a schedule. They let us know when each show will be on. They even bundle similar programming, then brand it. For the most part, it works. It should work on your hyperlocal news site or community blog.
Regularly scheduled programming
Recurring features have several advantages. Themes are reusable, so after you come up with the first one, the rest get easier and better. They are also easier on the reader. After the first couple, they know what to expect.
Do it well, add in a little branding and the reader will come to associate the feature with your and come back for more.
Feature Ideas
Of course, news about the neighborhood is you main feature. Here we’re talking about finding one or two types of articles, and running them regularly on a particular day of the week or month. It doesn’t have to be hard news, just something interesting to you.
If possible listing them on their own special page and even attaching a nice logo. Something to make them stand out.
Open Threads: Write a short post asking an open ended question. Follow-up on each comment with a response. Also, there’s no law against having a friend or two seed your comments at the beginning. Just to get the ball rolling.
If successful, this participation should eventually spill over into other articles as well.
Example: Open Thread
Holiday/Festival Page: There’s some type of big, yearly community happening in every town. Write a couple articles about it every month and you’ll soon be the go-to place for news about that event. Add them all to one search engine friendly page for an added bonus.
Example: Holiday Page
Take Up a Cause: Find something in your community that needs changed and beat the hell out of it. You don’t have to take down the mayor or anything, but they are always things that could be fixed if someone would take the time.
Example: Prescription for Abuse
Thing of the Week: Pet the Week, Person of the Week, Pothole of the Week, you get the idea. These can be fun and informative. They work great with a couple nice big picture, and short bio.
Example: Pet of the Week
Op Ed: Every news organization should have an opinion section. If, for no other reason than to just let off some steam. Give it a snappy title with some local flavor and become a real person to the reader. If you can’t find at least one thing each week that pisses you off or makes you happy, it’s probably time for a vacation.
There are also the Guest Posts, someone interesting who can be talked into writing a regular column. Local historians work great, but in a pinch realtors and lawyers always have something to say.
Example: Daft Old Duffer
Example: Jon Stevens
Photo Series: Go for a bike ride and take a bunch of photos, or set up a group on something like flickr. Each week add a post with an interesting picture and a little description. Good variations are Photo Hunts and a Local Architecture series.
Example: View of Knoxville
The Roundup: Meetings, School Sports, Top Stories, Social Media. Repackage the best content of the week. Add some extra depth and a follow-up, give it another chance to be seen.
Advertisers/Business: Give a shout-out to your advertisers, let the reader know the advertiser is supporting your site. Profile a local business, maybe gain a new advertiser in the process. No harm in letting partners contribute sponsored posts.
Other Stuff I’ve Seen: Weekly Poll, Jigsaw Photo Puzzles, Weekly Recipes, Faces in the Crowd. Little things like that get readers used to spending time and interacting with your site.
Be creative. If it works great, if not you can always cancel it and program something else. Let me know what regular features you’re running. I’d like to read them.
Finding and reading different hyperlocal news sites is the best thing about having this directory. Over here on the blog portion, we offer suggestions about how to make those sites better and easier to run.
Here are today's ideas for taking your site up a notch, without breaking the bank or getting your hands too dirty.
Finding the right pictures to go along with the day's news is one of the most time consuming parts of making a good community news site. Now, take those pictures up a notch.
Reduce the File Size: Large files take longer to load, trim down those photos. Don't give your reader an extra second to think about clicking over to another site.
Making the actual size of the image smaller is just the first step. Saving the picture at a lower resolution will be a big help too. While you're at it, run the picture through one of the tools that can bring down file size without sacrficing image quality, like smush.it or shrink-o-matic.
After slimming down the image files, test your site and see what else can be done to speed up your website.
Add an Image Border: Nice image borders are a quick way to add some class to a news website. They make each picture look a little more hand chosen, and not just slapped up there at the last minute.
Without Border
With Border
Classy right? All this, and it only takes a couple little lines of code in your stylesheet.
img {
padding:1px;
border:1px solid #021a40;
}
To find your CSS file in Wordpress, check out: Finding your CSS files in Wordpress. Once you get the hang of it, there are plenty of variations on the image border to try out.
When you want to create a quick and dirty map to go along with a story, try using a Fusion Table from Google Docs. It's a pretty easy way to visualize data and embed it straight into an article as a map, or chart.
First though, determine if the article even needs a map. Is it a single event occuring in one location? Then no, we don't need to see it on a map. Are there multiple locations with related occurrences? Then yes, map the heck out of 'em.
That's some useful data visualization.
The Basic How To
Fusion Tables is a Google product, so first you're gonna need an account with them.
Gather up your data onto a spreadsheet, either within Google Docs, or on something like Excel. For a simple map you'll need at least two things, the name and location of the item to be mapped. The location can be in lattitude and longitude format, but a simple street address will work also. Save the document when you're done. If you're using an excel sheet, save that document as a .csv file.
Go into your Google Docs account and select Create then Table. (Don't worry that it says beta next to Table, we're on the cutting edge here.) Now, upload that spreadsheet you just created into the Fusion Table:
Selecting Next will allow you to review the table being uploaded. If satisfactory, keep clicking Next and your table will be created. Review the table, make sure everything is in the right place. When you're ready to create the map, select Visualize, then on the dropdown click Map:
This should bring you to the newly created map. Here you can zoom in, check it out, make sure all the points and address transferred over. If they haven't, select Visualize Table, to go back into the table and manually select the addresses and verify their correct location.
Alright, we've got a map to publish, now we just need to get it from here and into the article on your site. To do this, you'll need the embed link code.
To get the code, you'll first need to make the map public. Select the Share button at the top right of the page, then on the pop-up menu change the visibility options to public.
Now that the map is Public, you'll see a Get Embeddable Link link. Grab that code and insert it into the story. You'll probably have to switch over to html in the text editor of your content management system to get it to work corrrectly. Same idea as embedding a YouTube video.
When complete, you'll have a nice clickable map right on your page:
Once you get the hang of creating a map, take some time to explore other ways fusion tables can be used to visualize data. It's a pretty powerful tool for journalists and publishers.
Up against the hard deadline (watching a football game), went a little over this week.
Here's what I missed:
If you haven't already, check out Issue #7 of the Go Hyperlocal Newsletter.
Or, go ahead and Subscribe to our newsletter right now.
It sure is great when people call you up out of the blue with news tips, offers to fill some advertising space, and straight up cash as a way of saying thank you.
Yeah, right.
Running a hyperlocal news site as an independent is hard. If you want some help, you’re gonna have to ask.
If that picture of a tip jar linking to a PayPal page isn’t working, or that Contact Us page with a single email address isn’t generating any contacts, maybe it’s time to try something new.
What do you want?
If you want donations, make a page telling the reader why. Create a visible link to the donation page on your home page. Write a post every couple of months linking to the page. Hire a skywriter.
Focus the call to action. A button that says Help, or Contribute is kind of vague. Asking directly for Donations, or News Tips should be more effective.
Readers may be surprised to learn that it costs a lot of money for a small news organization to operate a website and produce quality news in their neighborhood.
What’s in it for them?
List some recent past accomplishments. It’s not begging if you can make a clear case about why your site is important. If you can’t do this, then you’re in big trouble anyway. Be sure to include whether or not donations are tax-deductible, or if news tipsters can remain anonymous.
Offer rewards, or other special recognition. If someone sends in a really good story, offer to meet them in a well lit place for a cup of coffee. Set up a donor wall with big font for the biggest givers. People love seeing their name in big font. Send out a quarterly State of the Site email to contributors, keep them involved.
What can you do for them?
Simply listing an email address is easy for you, but it might not be easy for your readers. As a writer, you should know that a blank page can be intimidating. List exactly what the reader can do to help. Examples.
Forms
Give them a head start with a form. People think they hate forms. But they really just hate bad forms. Good forms help the user focus their thoughts, and provide hints along the way toward the goal of a final action.
There are several decent sites that will help you build a form and embed it into your page, and can even handle PayPal transactions. Look for the ones that can integrate with your newsletter management system.
Remember to ask only for the information required to complete the task at hand. You don’t need their phone number, or their birthday.
Follow Through
This should go without saying, but be sure to respond promptly if someone takes the time to contact you.
Streetlife, a local social network for communities in the UK, is out with a nicely refreshed look and video. (Voiced by Stephen Fry)
The intent of the site is to allow neighbors to exchange news and ideas with each other and help them find others nearby who share their interests.
Signup only requires a valid postcode. While you can also log in via Facebook, a great feature of the site is that it connects you to neighbors and not just to friends.
We've seen a few examples of neighborhood social networks recently, and this one seems promising.
Video Explains it better than I could.
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Disclaimer: There is no connection between the directory and the sites contained therein. We just think they're cool.
