[...] WikiCity, a hyperlocal site with local content for just more than 22,000 U.S. communities that I wrote about on this blog in [...]

[...] WikiCity, a hyperlocal site with local content for just more than 22,000 U.S. communities that I wrote about here in [...]

[...] Wikicity Aims To Tap Hyper-Niche Markets For News And Information September 13th, 2009 The NicheMaster Wikicity Aims To Tap Hyper-Niche Markets For News And Information [...]

Maybe a way to think about how this model works for any newspaper in any particular geographic area. Unlike the old days “living” in a small town, does not mean “thinking or talking in a small town.’

So if the appropriate unit of analysis is the “community of interest”, space becomes a dependent as opposed to an independent variable.

The most interesting-to-me way this might play out is in seeing a high school as a spaced bounded community of interest that can distribute it’s memes through parents and teachers.

You raise a good point. Many of the WikiCity pages now are empty. That’s why I think the greatest potential success for WikiCity would be in teaming up local newspapers, which could lend the local flare and knowledge. But that may not work either. It’s really unclear to me at this point.

As far as you point about the fallacy of my argument that it’s time-consuming, costly and difficult for smaller papers to build hyperlocal pages, I can’t agree with you there. Maybe it’s possible for some papers, but I think many really don’t have the staffers who know how to do that. They can’t hire, so they must rely on training existing employees on already-depleted staffs.

The results it you can’t have the instant fluidity that is needed to really make a new project work. It’s more like plan a prototype, put it together over six months and then launch and see if it works. To me, it’s beneficial to get an idea up and running more quickly and, as they say, fail quickly, and tweak as you go.

I guess I wonder if quality hyperlocal projects are so easy for smaller papers, why aren’t they doing a better job at them?

Spend any time wandering around WikiCity, and what you find is the same dog who doesn’t bark. No sense of each town’s quirkiness; no sense of place. Instead of a local cafe where the cook knows you like your eggs scrambled, you get an Egg McMuffin.

Back when most newspaper owners actually cared about the towns they served, there was a healthy symbiosis between resident-journalists and non-journalist residents with everyone mostly trying to row the same boat. Reporters were paid because folks found it useful to support somebody who could write well about what the town wanted or needed to know about. All of which is now supposed to somehow be magically replaced with local volunteers interested in helping WikiCity make money.

It should also be mentioned that one of the larger foundational fallacies of the WikiCity model is that, in your words, “building hyperlocal pages and innovations like these, particularly for the smallest newspapers, can be costly, time-consuming and sometimes impossible given technological limitations of staffs.” This is simply not true, or at least not true to the extent you probably think it is.

[...] WikiCity aims to tap hyper-niche markets for news and information. [Neiman Journalism Lab] [...]

[...] WikiCity aims to tap hyper-niche markets for news and information. [Neiman Journalism Lab] [...]

[...] Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab. [...]

[...] http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/wikicity-aims-to-tap-hyper-niche-markets-for-news-and-information/ [...]