Hyperlocal news stepping up to the plate?

Today's New York Times has a timely trend piece about the rise of "hyperlocal" news sites--those that aim to create or aggregate news down to the neighborhood (or block). The angle: will these sites take over as an increasing number of local newspapers go under?

If you read tech news regularly, you probably won't find much that's surprising in the article, since sites like Outside.in and Placeblogger have been around for years now. But the question of what will happen, now that struggling newspapers are cutting back on their print editions, or even shutting down altogether, is now a not-so-local issue.

The Times story raises the usual concerns: thoroughness and accuracy. It spotlights one hyperlocal news site, Patch, which was founded and funded by incoming AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong and which aims for a hybrid of the user-generated and traditional news models by hiring community reporters.

What it doesn't mention: that The New York Times Company itself has threatened to shut down one of its regional newspaper properties, The Boston Globe.

[AlanChokov]

The hyperlocal news platform hopefully will be a compliment to newspapers and other printed media formats and not contributing to their demise. It has become apparent that the thirst for "news on the go" and "only selected topics of interest" has attracted societies attention. As the publisher of a hyperlocal portal for New Jersey, the transition to a large degree to the Internet for news was inevitable.

All business has to evolve at some point, and new business models have to be adapted. There will always be those who prefer the newspaper as their content source.

[celticbrewer]

I tried placeblogger and it seemed junky. Outside.in was blocked from work which never bodes well. I like the premise, but with so many ways to post and distribute information these days, who is fact-checking? Who is held responsible for bad news- whether posted in error or with malice? To get to the neighborhood level, the site isn't going to hire a reporter for each location which means that people will be encouraged to contribute their own content. Then you end up with an even greater degree of one-sided journalism than what we have now.

RSS would be a good way for organizations to spread info. We just need a site to find all local RSS feeds (by zip) and allow people to sign up. Then the end-user program can post news by date or by topic in a newspaper-like format rather than just a list of titles and snippets. I'm betting that already exists somewhere, but I haven't found it (or looked for it). Besides, the local content probably isn't dishing up RSS anyways: Town Hall/police/fire/schools/public works, Community Organizations, Small Businesses.

People can then set thresholds for non-local news. Say, if link xyz within 100 miles was clicked on 1000 times by visitors, then I want to see it, too. If link qrs within 3000 miles was clicked on 25,000 times, then I want to see it.

There- now someone can go get rich off my idea :-)