Difficulties in Sustaining Hyperlocal News

Hamburg.
The final speaker in this ECREA 2010 panel is Angela Phillips, who highlights the disappearance of local news; this is a significant challenge to democracy, as it makes it more difficult for citizens to participate in democratic processes in an informed fashion. She highlights hyperlocal blogs as a potential solution here, but these sites are in the main run by enthusiasts without any financial base, and this means that their quality and reach remain limited.

Finding hyperlocal news information is difficult: we don’t know what we need to know; there is no obvious equivalent to a front page of newspaper poster; there is no obvious equivalent to a news bulletin; and there are homogenising effects of online search. So, the hyperlocal sites which do exist could be seen as speaking only to a small elite of the already converted.

Goldsmiths College has set up its own hyperlocal news site as a practical experiment. In order to make this possible, they also sought advertising, which proved difficult; online advertising is directed mainly at specific niche sites, and local advertisers remain disinterested in online advertising, still preferring printed leaflets. A different approach is to place stories into the Twitter and Facebook streams, and rely on people to pass on news items to their networks; this, too, however, doesn’t solve the problem of trying to fund journalistic activities.

In other words, there is a profound crisis of journalism at the local level.