By Steve Safran, Editor, Lost Remote

I'm thrilled to see all the new experiments that are going on in local and social media. I've been preaching this stuff for a long time, and it's great to see conventional media outlets taking an interest in launching new sites that aren't necessarily just further extensions of its news or station brand.

Online, we must remember, is a different medium. We have to create programming for it and that means finding the best name possible for each new "program" or site. As editor of Lost Remote, I come across a fair number of press releases for these sites. One caught my eye today that inspired today's entry. It was for a local niche site about moms. This is a terrific idea.

I've seen success stories about "mom blogs" in many cities. However, the news referred to the site as a "hyperlocal mom blog," and there we disagree. (I'm not picking on the site or the station that is doing this - they're providing us an excellent example.) What they are building is a niche. They have found a topic in their marketplace, in this case, motherhood, and have built a site dedicated to it. That's great. But it's a "niche" site, not a "hyperlocal" site. If it were dedicated to moms in a neighborhood in that town, it would be closer to "hyperlocal," but it would still be "niche" first. So, while these sites are starting to blossom, let's make sure we have our definitions correct.

Local: What we think of when we watch local news or read a local newspaper. Coverage of a city, town or region as a whole. News about New York City is local.

Hyperlocal: Coverage of a neighborhood or district within a city or town. News about East Village is hyperlocal. (See the project the NY Times is doing with NYU for this example.)

Niche: A marketplace vertical. A "New York City Moms Blog" is a niche site, not a hyperlocal site. If we had an East Village Moms Blog, we'd have a hyperlocal niche site. It's important we note the distinction among these terms and keep them straight. This isn't just a matter of nitpicking - it goes directly to our strategy-making. We have to get the words right.

 

 

POST A COMMENT

Close

While the East Village may be "hyperlocal" for NYC, an area comprised of half a county in a rural area of say Texas could also be considered hyperlocal if it's being covered by a website, and the local TV and radio stations all cover the "Tri-County region".
Could hyperlocal somehow be defined in relationship to traditional media? That doesn't quite feel right either.