New Yorker profiles AOL and Patch

New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta has written a profile of AOL and its effort to become a major online content provider (i.e., online news operation) - including the recent explosion Patch sites around the country. Auletta's assessment isn't kind, saying the content is "piffle."

Here's how PaidContent summarizes Auletta's view of Patch (New Yorker story is subscription only):

Patch, which Auletta puts at 700 outlets and has 750-plus now, is too much like “digital Yellow Pages” plus has tension between journalism and boosterism—and probably costs too much to last at an estimated $30 million a quarter.

The hectic effort to get Patch to the 750 number before the close of 2010 certainly had an effect on quality - something the managers of Patch admitted internally. Whether AOL has a strategy to turn this around, now that it has numbers, remains the central question. Auletta doesn't think it will. Again, from PaidContent:

AOL gets points for hiring hundreds of journalists for Patch and hiring some talented journalists overall, but loses some for failing to hire an editor in chief. It also loses some for losing reporters. AOL refugee Jeff Bercovici told Auletta one reason he switched to Forbes.com was to get his calls returned but also cited the pressure to reverse a downward trend. And this was written when FanHouse was an AOL brand; late last week Armstrong announced plans to outsource most of sports, health and real estate. Auletta’s take: AOL does not seem to be saving journalism, and journalism does yet seem to be saving AOL.” He carefully leaves the door ajar for that possibility but clearly doesn’t expect it.

 The New York Times had a story yesterday that gives us a glimpse of the Patch metrics (found via LA Observed):

Traffic on individual sites is low; former editors say that the average post attracts just 100 views and that they considered 500 page views a wild success. But the overall traffic is growing quickly.

In December, Patch had just over three million unique visitors, 80 times that of a year earlier, according to comScore.

Yet over the years, a number of so-called hyperlocal news sites have failed, and the idea is largely unproved financially.

Hyperlocal hypersports and the nationalization of local news

Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in America, plans to launch 100 "hyperlocal" high school sports sites that will be patched together on the HighSchoolSports.net platform. PaidContent writes:

This current sports effort will begin this month in 38 Gannett media markets, including Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Denver, CO. The full rollout is expected to be completed by the end of 2010.

This patchwork approach to coverage (also AOL's model for its Patch sites) is probably the future for newspaper chains and national media companies, as they go smaller, more local and more niche with their coverage but use their vast resources and broad name recognition to create a regional or national networks based on common themes. It's sort of what the fragmentation of the small- and medium-size newspaper was heading for anyway.

Is it hard to imagine MediaNews, Belo and Gannett partnering on a regional high school sports network that pushes scores and updates to mobile devices while feasting on what's left of the auto and mall advertisers in Southern California?

It would make sense under this model for other popular beats - cops, courts, schools, weather - to be strung together and published on similar platforms. Readers might turn to a regional or national Gannett-run network to get their local police blotter, for instance. The model uses fewer journalists, offers a single focus and yet still allows the company to sell ads on a regional or national level.

It's not the greatest news for journalists, given that the coverage is almost certain to lead to fewer jobs, require less skill, offer less interesting experience, and create a box that eschews enterprise or creativity.

Here's how Ken Doctor sees it in his examination of AOL's Patch:

The fact that Patch is getting such recognition, and discussion, is another indicator of how thoroughly journalism has fallen on hard times. The announcement of the hiring of a single journalist in a single community? That was the stuff of internal newsroom memos not too long ago. It’s as if the news industry is struggling to rebuild itself, cell by cell, just as researchers are figuring out how humans themselves can regenerate lost limbs and organs.

At the same time, Doctor points out that the oxymoron of national chains doing hyperlocal is probably the way of the future. Here's why (again, using Patch as the example):

It seems to me that scale is a plus in a couple of ways: 1) national ad sales (witness the Pepsi Refresh campaign running across the current sites) and 2) technology costs, with one centralized production and presentation system, one that should be able to get to market quicker with tech innovations. In two important ways, though, scale will be of a lot less help — and these are core to the site’s promise and success: 1) local content production and 2) local ad sales. Patch, with its organizational structure, will get some efficiency boost through regionalized ad selling and some content sharing (as sites with a common school district may combine coverage, for instance). In the main, though, the hard work of gathering local news and selling local merchants isn’t greatly helped by the national brand.

Pasadena Now discovers the green screen

Pasadena Now, the online "hyperlocal" news site that purportedly pays writers in India to rewrite city press releases, and which has broken such hard-hitting stories as: "Prominent Pasadena business executives and community leaders are accused of 'Having a big heart for Jerry’s Kids'," is planning to launch a TV network, fishbowlLA reports.

James Macpherson, the visionary who founded Pasadena Now, told fishbowl's Matthew Fleischer that green screens plus L.A. talent equals high-quality productions for cheap:

One great example is the green screen + virtual set dynamic. Formerly the territory of CNN's and ESPN's, now this tool is common.

LA is loaded with talent and knowledge. Our objective is to produce compelling content with highest production value at lowest cost. We are very fortunate that a leading So Cal special effects studio has offered to assist us with technology and the use of a studio.

We hope to present a mix of video styles, from user-generated videos which we curate and edit, to studio-shot programs, to live streamed important civic events.

Citizen journalists will always miss the Bell

In a column posted on LA Observed, Ellen Alperstein argues that "citizen" journalists missed the Bell salary scandal precisely because it's the kind of story only professional journalists would pursue (even if it takes them a while to get around to it). Here's an excerpt:

Even though citizen journalism is a wonderful addition to the collection and dissemination of news and community development, it isn't going to replace the kinds of stories people need with regularity to expose civil servants gone wild, hold them accountable and effect positive change of a profound and sustained nature.

There was a lot in the first L.A. Times story about Bell you could have found out yourself. But you're not going to, and neither is anybody else who doesn't have the financial support of a publisher willing to fund the effort society requires to make informed decisions and protect public resources from egregious misappropriation. This isn't new, and you're tired of hearing it and what it costs. But it bears repeating because malfeasance never sleeps and because people who live free don't know what they have until they don't have it.

Meantime, the whole "hyperlocal" movement contends that it can find better stories than the crumbling mainstream media. Let's look at a couple stories from AOL's WestHollywoodPatch, which has paid writers. The links were passed on to me by a West Hollywood friend who claims he suffered a brain injury trying to read them:

West Hollywood Gets Its Groove
Q & A: Fire Capt. Fred Selmo

Four in the morning

1. In the new media world, everyone loves "collaboration" - but is it really worth the hassle? Nieman Journalism Lab

2. L.A. writer Nicky Loomis offers an updated take on dating etiquette, in the era of pervasive online sharing and TMI texting. Pasadena Star-News

3. Pasadena-expat Todd Ruiz tracks the rise of the anti-government Reds in Thailand. Reporter in Exile

4. Finding an audience for "hyperlocal" in Chicago. TechCrunch

NPR's version of hyperlocal

The folks at NPR have started hiring staffers to oversee Project Argo, a collaboration with local NPR affiliates set to launch this summer.

With $3 million in seed money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Knight Foundation, NPR will hire bloggers for two-year stints at several local stations to do beat reporting. As I understand it, the stories are supposed to enhance the coverage of the local stations while giving NPR a well of localized material to draw upon.

Here are the participating stations:

KPBS (San Diego); KPCC (Southern California); KQED (San Francisco); KALW (San Francisco); OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting); KPLU (Tacoma/Seattle); MPR (Minnesota Public Radio); WAMU (DC); WXPN (Philadelphia) ; WNYC (New York); WBUR (Boston); and WGBH (Boston).

NPR is all about collaboration these days, so I'd expect Project Argo, if successful, to become a seed for other media partnerships in these areas.

(found via Romensko)

Hyperlocal in L.A.

The "hyperlocal" journalism movement is the topic on today's "Which Way, LA?" The guests are Frank Gruber, a columnist at the Santa Monica Lookout News and attorney; Judy Muller, associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California; Leo Wolinsky, former Metro editor at the Los Angeles Times and co-founder of The Journalism Shop, and Julian Do, Southern California director of New America Media. The show, which starts at 7:30 p.m., was produced by Frances Anderton.

Little news

Newsweek chronicles the "hyperlocal" movement's attempts to gain a foothold in three New Jersey suburbs. It appears that even though the business model has yet to pay off that the homegrown efforts started by local journalists already are being supplanted by sites owned by national media giants - the New York Times, AOL and MSNBC among them. Why would the majors want to play in the minor leagues? From Newsweek

[I]f an operation like AOL's Patch can link together a network of $200,000-a-year sites each run by a single reporter, and then amortize big expenses (like technology and ad sales) across multiple sites, you could start to see decent profits. The low overhead is crucial: not only are startups like Patch using less costly labor, but they also believe readership and revenue will grow as networks of hyperlocal blogs link to each other, and as they become adept at persuading small businesses that never advertised in newspapers to give online advertising a shot—a key to Patch's strategy.

This model would probably only work in heavily populated suburbs. But it does seem logical that the chain websites would end up chasing revenue from the other types of chains that grow up in suburban landscapes: Starbucks, Ruby Tuesdays, Barnes and Noble, and the like. That, in turn, is likely going to shape how these sites develop.

"We don't want it to look like there's an ad"

According to Oregon Media Central, the newest real estate reporter on Portland's KOIN-TV is a practicing real estate agent. Ron Pivo, the Realtor reporter, used to cover sports; now he makes balloon animal jokes and compares himself to Sanjay Gupta on CNN to downplay his conflict of interest. The station's news director assured viewers that Pivo's listings won't be featured in his reports.

Nothing says "trust us" like a disclaimer.

Apparently Realtors make great "hyperlocal" citizen journalists. In Seattle, Fisher Communications has launched a bunch of community blogs that will use real estate agents as news gatherers. Fisher's vice president of news had this to say:

We had the idea to work with Realtors because they drive around and they have cameras, and they do a lot of community work, obviously, with their jobs. The one rule that we have with them is that they can’t write about real estate. We don’t want it to look like there’s an ad. There’s been no money that has changed hands in this deal. When we were talking about what groups to reach out to for user-generated material, Realtors just struck us as a natural fit for that, because they are community-based.

Admittedly it is tough to find community-based people in a community who also drive around and have cameras, especially if you're looking for people with a vested interest in promoting themselves and local businesses and who also work for companies that buy lots of ad space.

Jargon to the rescue

Yet another journalism conference. Get your tickets now.

A new voice in Newport Beach

A group of journalists with roots at the Daily Pilot and LA Times have launched an online news site called The Daily Voice that will cover Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. Co-founder Tom Johnson explains the situation:

No large backers. No deep pockets. Just a group of us committed to providing Newport-Mesa with more local news, commentary and information, at a time when many news organizations are folding up shop.

We’ll start with some baby steps, but will grow up soon enough with the help of additional contributors and reader input. Stay tuned and you’ll see: the latest news posted whenever it happens; a fun and unique way to cover prep sports (we’ll tell you the secret this fall); community commentary from a diverse group of locals; and video for better editorial coverage and better results for advertisers.

They are soliciting donations "large or small" to keep the publication going.

I've heard rumblings that other former LA Times staffers have plans for online news sites.

(h/t Scott Martelle)

Four in the evening

Chicago Tribune to cut 20 percent of its newsroom staff (Chicago Business)

Hyperlocal sites ready to bloom - just add content. (NYT)

On the bright side, the stock is a steal. (WSJ)

LA Times executive editor no fan of advertorials. (The Wrap)