The word hyperlocal comes and goes, and right now, it appears to be back.
CNN has an article today citing that the future of online news may be hyperlocal. They may be right.
Since 2004, when trouble in the news industry started to show, at least 800 community news Web sites have popped up, according to Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. The sites often do a better job at covering community news than large newspapers did, even before the papers started to collapse, she said.
Jane McDonnell, executive director of the Online News Association, said the hyperlocal movement places emphasis on community news that’s written by volunteers who usually are entrenched in their neighborhoods.
The shift “means that there’s less journalistic oversight over what is being disseminated and distributed and created,” she said. “That raises all the natural questions about how valuable the news is going to be — how credible it’s going to be. I kind of think that argument is moot at this point because it’s happening.”
McDonnell said it’s important for news consumers these days to be savvy so they can spot conflicts of interest and assess the reliability of what they’re reading.
Some nonprofit news sites train their volunteers so they have a basic understanding of how to get the facts right and how to report fairly on controversial issues before they publish stories.
I word at a newspaper that does not use the Associated Press. In one respect, those entities might also be considered hyperlocal. However, there is a new trend of bloggers taking their own communities news into their own hands. Personally, I like it.
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