Is mobile, hyper-local, location-based news content the way to save mainstream media in the USA?
I think it might be. I have been watching closely over the past few months as newspaper after newspaper has fallen away in the US. It’s a very scary and very sad situation that American media finds itself in. Resistance to change over the past few years has positioned many papers in a dire situation where it’s a matter of shit or get off the pot. And many are shitting themselves.
Boston Globe is a one example that I have been watching withe extreme interest. Boston.com is a great resource that has not been used effectively enough to pull Boston Globe out of financial trouble.
The resistance to change coupled with a severe drop in advertising and circulation (with thanks to a recession and online media emerging as a force in the media industry) has left the Boston Globe almost crippled. Many people are set to lose jobs and Boston, the city, is set to lose it’s competitive media market. If Boston Globe closes down the city of Boston will be left with a single daily newspaper. This defeats the purpose of mainstream media acting as a democratic watchdog or fourth estate. With one media organisation remaining things are not looking good.
Enter hyper-local, location-based news content fed to mobile phones produced by hyper-local citizen media producers who put content up via cellphones on to hyper-local portals.
This is what Martin Langeveld of Nieman Journalism Lab had to say on the topic of Boston Globe:
Langeveld’s advice is to go (almost) online-only with Boston.com, and to launch or subsidise a network of hyperlocal sites all over the area, and launch a network of local niche verticals focussed on weather, traffic, jobs, entertainment, education and more. He proposes a tiered, variable pricing model for all, with most of the content free, but paid premium access for a “small but highly-engaged group.” This income could be supplemented with transactional revenue, through selling theatre tickets, for example, or facilitating restaurant reservations.
This model could also expose the Globe’s city-wide reach to a hyper-local market of advertisers (a longer tail than they would previously had access to). This coupled with a free/premium hybrid mode and the paper could be on its way back up.
Regarding the print side of things it’s a simple mechanic to alleviate some immediate strain: Make the paper a weekly and include the news created over the week from the hyper-local portals and citizens media. Pull city-wide, larger advertisers in to this weekly printed publication to subsidise the cost of the print and drop the price to allow for quantity to be sold and to make the paper appear to be more accessible to the everyday person in the street.
There is no quick-fix for papers such as the Boston Globe, that is certain. But it is imperative that these papers start to adapt or simply succumb to a swift death.
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