"Is it a local paper if you don't have an editorial board to weigh in on matters of local importance, to call out the school board and complain about lousy streets? Is it a local paper if you rely on stringers to cover the big football games and miss the Cinderalla story that a beat reporter would've nailed?"
--What the future of news looks like in Alabama after Advance cuts staff by 400 | Poynter. http://bit.ly/LsG2Gd

In 1995, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Newhouse hired me to create and edit New Jersey Online, the first Newhouse online site, which drew from three local papers.  Here we are in 2012, 17 years later (!), and Newhouse has just laid off 400 people at their three Alabama papers and created a hub structure for managing operations. Steve Myers has a terrific piece about the layoffs at Poynter where he asks questions about how the papers will be able to operate locally with such deep cuts.

Meyers also quotes management as saying "The Mobile newsroom, which after vacancies are filled will have about half the current staff, "will be a hyperlocal operation." The staff "will cover the hell out of local news." "

He also says: "Advance seems to think a local newspaper is three things: a small group of reporters, advertisers who need your paper whether it's published three days or seven, and some readers."

Welcome to the present reality, folks. We're in a value-based economy here on the hyperlocal news front, not one based on brand, distribution or who's friends with the Mayor.  The level playing field is now about big corporate entities trying to scale down to the size of, say The St. Louis Beacon so they can pay their bills, turn some profit, and survive.

Here in Oakland, where a small team of us run Oakland Local, a future of news non-profit web site and training organization, we're adding advertisers and audience as the local paper, now managed out of San Jose but with a just opened "community newsroom" downtown, struggles to copy our model (and that of many other hyperlocal sites) and involve citizen reporters (even though they can't appear beside the union folks). 

Like the Alabama Newhouse properties, the Bay Area News Group papers are also being run as a hub, and they seem to be surviving, if not thriving--but the word is that more cuts are being planned there, as well.  Certainly, the paper's ability to cover Oakland has diminished as Oakland has become less of a profitable focus for the hub organization, but hunger has driven flexibility, as seasoned general-assignment reporters cover not one, but two to four beats. 

Here in the East Bay as  Oakland Local--and our cousins Berkeleyside and The Alamedan-grow, my sense is that we are both picking up readers who no longer turn solely to the local paper and new readers who never cared about the paper in the first place.  In Oakland, OL's audience is notably younger, browner, and more entreprenurial/activist/small business/creative class that the core audience for both the local paper and the local alt.weekly; in Berkeley, Berkleyside is developing a huge following based on an insider voice the local paper never achieved, and in Alameda, the newly revived local non-profit news site is covering stories the paper also doesn't seem to see.

The good news: relevancy drives audience.  The bad news: it's economically  brutal.

What the papers have that the hyperlocals don't is infrastructure and scale. While Myers is correct that selling locally will be tough without local salespeople, the reality is that alot of the great money is in regional and co-op buys, which most hyperlocal sites are not set up to handle.  The myth of print distribution means that a run of papers, read or not, can sell a buy to a regional advertiser who will also be willing to do a smaller online buy, state-wide.  An Oakland Local can't (yet) compete with that, though that day will surely come.

Newhouse has been printing and distributing papers since the early days in Bayonne, NJ and I don't see them getting out of the business anytime soon.  But in this economic climate, cutting staffers, consolidating operations and--as much as possible--trying to act like a lean startup--is unavoidable. 

Welcome to the future of news, where the Minimum Viable Product isn't just a tech idea, it's a real way to produce local community media.

It's 10:15 on May 1st.  At 8:30 am, I started getting materials ready for Oakland Local's team to cover the Occupy Oakland General strike. With three people in the field, and 3 volunteers in the office, OL managed to pump out more than 300 photos, 60 tweets from the scene, and 3-5 articles, depending on how you count the updates to the stories. We'll be filing more stories tomorrow, including some reflection/opinion pieces from the reporters, who are welcoming a chance to share some impressions now that May Day is (almost) over.

How did we manage to create content that was picked up and carried across the country with a team that's part-time, could definitely be better paid, and was 50% volunteer?

Or--to put it another way--how come we keep doing this work when the calls for support for funding our Occupy Oakland coverage-which probably more than 6,000 people read today, if previous stats mean anything--didn't even net us contributions to cover the way too small sum we spent on our hard-working reporters?

Part of what keeps me working at making Oakland Local work is the pride I have in the talented team.  We have a number of people--our managing editor and several reporters among them--who've worked with Oakland Local for more than 2 years (we're 2.6 years old).
These people tell me they stay with OL because they believe in what we're doing and think it can work--and they thing our reporting and trainings are making a difference in Oakland.

To me, that sense of dedication was evident in the reporters we had out there today. Our team started at 10 am, covered more than 3 actions and marches all over the city, came into our workspace and filed and dumped photos so volunteers could process their work, then went back out and kept working late into the night. Unlike the folks at the mainstream media outlet when went off shift and were done for the night,our team chose to keep going right till the last policeman moved people out of Frank Ogawa Plaza.

As the editor/publisher of this enterprise, this is a great moment to reflect not only on the good work we did, but on how Oakland Local motivates people.  With the late-night,woozy haze of a glass of wine and post half-watching a movie, some reflections:

People on the team choose to work here.  OL doesn't pay well enough that people who are unhappy, feel misunderstood or unappreciated have incentives to stay. In a way, it's a zero sum game--if it works for you, you enjoy it. If it doesn't, you split.

People on the team know their work has impact and makes a difference. In such a flat organization, people are appreciated for what they can do--and they can make substantial contributions fairly quickly.  One of our newer reporters, who has a flair for social media, has incredibly enhanced our work by live-tweeting from the field, for example.

We try to have a play to your strengths environment. You do video, you like to live tweet? You're all about data visualization?  Because OL is about shared and mutual incentives, we try to support and use the skills and passions people have, as well as help them learn new things.

We haz food.  Yep, food. I'm positive that our reporting team did such a good job, in part, today because when they came back for lunch, as we'd arranged, they found trays of Vietnamese sandwiches (including a vegan one for the vegan), fruit, salad, home made smoked trout salad, crackers, cold cuts, a fruit smoothie, soft drinks, beer, chips and energy bars.  This food a) gave them some more energy  b) showed them people cared and valued what they were doing.

We're all invested in what we do.  Yes, we're all proud of Oakland Local. We're proud of what we do even as we wish it paid more, swear it needs to pay us more, and wonder when it will. The money's not so great, but the human capital and the pride are valuable--as is the resume credential for many of our writers.

It was an honor and a privilege to be one of the 125-odd local place-based sites to attend the first ever Block by Block ( #hashtag bxb2010). What could be better than sharing a room with other excited, passionate people running local web sites around the country and a handful of foundations interested in finding ways to support them?  There were even a few big company types--notably Yahoo's Local editor, Anthony Moor, and Patch's regional editorial director Tim Winsor, who came to express their interested and support.

All good, right?
Uh, not really,

24 hours after coming home and crashing for a day, and still excited about the great people I met and the valuable work we are doing, I kind of feel like I was at a poets' convention, or a meeting of botanical explorers who find rare plants and write them up, saving our ecosystem because they've tracked a piece of lichen whose spot in the food chain keeps the Northern ice floes from melting any faster.

Folks, we have a movement, but we have no tangible support.


We have voices applauding our willingness to work long hours for little or no pay, cheerleading the good--and the news--we provide to our communities--but not organized to fund us (especially on the local level, where many community foundations have no clue), and certainly not yet focused on helping us get the health insurance and the business infrastructure that will make our local endeavors flourish.

As someone who's worked on the web since before Mozilla launched back in the 90s, I have been involved with lots of speculative projects, and have done lots of things because they solved problems, hadn't been done before, or just seemed worth doing, but I am worried that the few foundations that so graciously came to this conference--and who are so genuinely interested and engaged--aren't enough to turn a gathering of admirers into a tangible movement to support new types of quality community and local media in the US.

I'm going to write about the cool people who were there and the useful things they said at some point, but I want to focus now, while the thoughts are clear, on what we need that we didn't necessarily talk about:

What we need NOW is  a means to have knowledge-sharing and support for the 125 people in the room and the other 5,000 who didn't know about or who couldn't come to the conference.  After all, as my friend Lisa Wiliams,  CEO of Placeblogger,  says: In 2006, 1 in 8 Americans lived in a city with a placeblog -- now the number is 1 in 2.

So, some suggestions as to what should be happening next so that there's some real teeth behind the smiles of our 24 hour meeting:

1) Set up a list-serv for Local site operators to knowledge share.
Definition of members: You must own and operate a local site, commercial or non-profit, revenue under $3MM year (funding can be greater, if you are so lucky).

2) Set up a wiki for list-serv members to share templates, best practices, etc. with one another. Publishers can choose what to make public, but the focus here is establishing a peer group.

3) Fund a community manager part-time who can manage 1 and 2. A grad student would do, but how about a site operator who needs some support instead? Form a committee and let people apply.

4) Fund a survey and have some foundations take a tangible action:
 Do we know what the most pressing needs of local site operators are?
I'd say revenue, but I'd also venture most of the ones who are less than 3 years old and/or who are non-profits with less than $100,000 in funding  lack business and marketing team members.  

The action step from determining business infrastructure was an issue, for example,  could be to set up a fund addressed to this purpose that could even do micro-lending to support bringing sales & marketing folks on to sites that seem viable, if cash-strapped.

5) Create a incubator to support new news ventures that aren't funded by wealthy patrons.
I spent a summer at Tech Stars, the venture incubator, and appreciated the portfolio management approach to VC investing which basically involved giving 10 companies some seed money ($10-15K), supporting them with skills building, and then providing further investment in the ones that seemed most promising.

Why don't we have the foundations who want to support community media and civic engagement do the same thing?

How about a joint $5MM community news fund that can run an incubator program for local news and fund on an incremental basis?  Such a program would both help local sites, AND provide a much better ROI ran some of the spot grants seem to.

What else do YOU think we need to do to help local community operators flourish? Post in the comments or use the tag #byb2010next