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 This item appeared in the September, 2009 edition of The Publisher.

Most newspapers devote critical development time and money and talent to figuring out how to automate pushing stories to the web and end up with sprawling, over-stuffed, under-read, expensive-to-maintain web sites that have no real idea of what needs they’re meeting.

For years now, the mantra repeated in publishers’ boardrooms across the continent when discussing the web has been: local, local, local. The generally accepted wisdom is that everybody but the Globe and Mail or the New York Times or Wall Street Journal had better concentrate on delivering intensely local web news, the one niche newspaper web sites believe they can exploit better than anyone else.

Two recent developments highlight both the truth of this idea, and the shallowness of most people’s understanding of it: The Washington Post announcement that it is finally pulling the plug on their multi-million-dollar venture into local news, LoudounExtra.com, a much hyped failure of a local news site piloted by web golden boy Rob Curley; and MSNBC’s acquisition of EveryBlock, a Knight Foundation News Challenge winner and hyper-local web news tool created by Curley’s stats and map-obsessed buddy, Adrian Holvaty.

Both were widely heralded explorations of what local news on the web should be. Both have essentially failed—while many other underfunded, under-hyped start-ups are succeeding (not to mention the well-funded types like Examiner.com, which has been growing by leaps and bounds and just bought out rival citizen journalism site  NowPublic).

The truth is, it ain’t easy being local. Curley’s LoudounExtra was a gorgeous, innovative local news site that blended local contributions (hand-picked bloggers) with aggressive, big league journalism that was intensely locally focused. The Post poured buckets of money into the site and its development, hoping it would be a pilot for a future chain of local, county-based news web sites. In typical Curley fashion, his team flooded the zone on high school sports coverage, offering player pages, reams of stats, highlight reels, and coach and player-of-the-game videos for every local high school football game. But Curley and his crew—a talented gang of web, video and graphic accolytes—left Loudoun after less than a year, admitting they’d failed to win the hearts of local Loudouners. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, LoudounExtra got scooped on the story of its own demise, scooped by two other long-standing local newspaper sites.

Curley and LoudounExtra failed in two critical (and common) ways: You can’t do local news at someone; you have to do it with them. Curley’s crew were (accurately) perceived as outsiders trying to prove a point, a bunch of talented whiz-bangs, looking to make their mark before moving on. You can come in from the outside and do local news, but you have to be seen to be putting down roots, to be willing to listen as much as talk. Curley’s a fabulous talker. So was his web site.

And LoudounExtra committed another common sin: they spent too much.

“We found that our experiment with LoudounExtra.com as a separate site was not a sustainable model” is how Kris Coratti, the Post’s director of communications, explained it, according to LoudounI.com.
Give them credit, at least they produced most of their own content. And at least the Post (eventually) paid attention to the economics, something few newspapers do. Really.

If they had to fund editorial from web revenue, most newspaper websites could never afford to produce the news they use on the web. But they don’t. They ‘repurpose’ print (or bound-for-print) stories with no thought as to what a local news web site should really be about. They devote critical development time and money and talent to figuring out how to automate pushing those stories to the web (because that’s “free” content) and end up with sprawling, over-stuffed, under-read, expensive-to-maintain web sites that have no real idea of what needs they’re meeting.

EveryBlock, on the other hand, knew exactly what needs they wanted to meet (“a newspaper for every block”) and how they were going to get it by scraping public databases and local news content, aggregating it and serving it up in useful, easy-to-use formats.

Using EveryBlock you can check out restaurant inspection records, grafitti clean-up orders, crime reports, fire dispatches, insurance rates and house values, voter registration data for any given block of 15 different cities (and more are being added all the time). The sites are eclectic and delightful, truly browse-worthy.
Founder Adrian Holvaty, a pioneer who famously hacked Google Maps to do the first real mashup of maps and crime data at ChicagoCrime.org, is visionary and a marvellously disruptive innovator who loves news and information but hates the way we “lock it up” in narrative form, i.e., in sentences and paragraphs instead of numbers and charts and diagrams. EveryBlock is his vision of local news.

This quote for an earlier blog post of Holvaty summarizes his philosophy:

It’s a hot topic among journalists right now: Is data journalism? Is it journalism to publish a raw database? Here, at last, is the definitive, two-part answer:

1. Who cares?

2. I hope my competitors waste their time arguing about this as long as possible.

Holvaty rolled EveryBlock out to 15 cities before releasing the source code for free to anyone who wants to use it to build their own sites, and then selling the company to MSNBC.com for an undisclosed sum.

Is data journalism?

But for all Holvaty’s talent (and chutzpah), it says here that EveryBlock is a failure—and a fundamental one at that. It failed to become the “newspaper” of ANY block in the cities it covers (its visits and page views are apparently very unimpressive). Everyblock failed for a simple reason—and the very reason I chose to highlight his dismissive quote about “Is data journalism?”

Data isn’t journalism. Raw data, information, acquires value through context and meaning. Journalism is all about providing context and meaning and being geographically ‘local’ just isn’t enough context to be consistently compelling. The data needs to be contextualized by humans, by people who are passionate about figuring out what it means.

EveryBlock is, in the end, an enviable, useful collection of tools with which you can do real journalism. And I suspect that shortly we’ll see more and more truly local sites grabbing those tools Holvaty has so brilliantly pioneered.

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Sites of the Month

LoudounExtra
~
The ‘frozen’ site can be found at
http://loudounextra.washingtonpost.com/news/local.

You can read their goodbye at:
http://bit.ly/daefE

EveryBlock
~
http://www.everyblock.com

Rob Curley’s blog:
http://www.robcurley.com

Adrian Holvaty’s blog and guitar videos:
http://www.holovaty.com

Worth Reading
~
Howard Owens, an interactive news and social media pioneer at the Bakersfield Californian, is forceful, although perhaps not elegant, in promoting the idea that news websites should sink or swim on their own. His blog is worth your time:
http://www.howardowens.com

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Bill Dunphy is a journalist, trainer and tech evangelist with the Hamilton Spectator. You’ll find him at www.billdunphy.caand www.twitter.com/typist. And you can talk to him at bd@billdunphy.ca.

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