What 35 hyperlocal news sites in Europe can teach us

We see lots of hand-wringing about the sorry state of local news organizations because of digital disruption of their financial models. I just happened on a 2016 study by Clare Cook, Kathryn Louise Geels, and Piet Bakker that finds reasons for optimism while realistically assessing the problem. Their study, Hyperlocal revenues in the UK and […]

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Court news, videos drive web operation in Colombia

Versión en español aquí.Just two years after its launch, the local news website zonacero.info (“ground zero”) in Barranquilla, Colombia, has managed to attract 200,000 visits a month. This in a city of just over 1 million population.This small staff of journalists demonstrates how knowing the community and understanding the audience can make the difference between […]

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TBD may have failed because of cultural clashes

Versión en español aquí. Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute has the best early take on why Washington’s hyperlocal TBD.com failed. One of his points is that the operation started out too big, with 50 people. This number troubled me from the first announcement of the launch. Why wouldn’t they start with a smaller staff […]

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