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The hyperlocal life cycle

18th July 2011 by William Perrin

Hyperlocal websites like any volunteer activity wax and wane.  The vast majority start off as volunteer efforts to help someone’s personal endeavour, campaign or hobby.  They can start quickly if they hit a rich vein or slowly building an audience month after month.  It’s common for sites to hit a bump and slow down for a spell and then come back to life.   What makes hyperlocal sites resilient?

Quite often sites hit a bump as a result of something happening to the lead contributor to the site.  People running a site might move house, have a baby, look after a sick relative, get a new partner, take up a new hobby, have pressures at work.  This can radically alter the amount of time a person has to run a website.   This ‘volunteer time budget’ is often very loosely defined from a few minutes a day to copy and paste some stuff in to several hours a week to write original stuff or take and edit pictures.

People (often professional writers) are surprised that people do want to volunteer to do this stuff for free, but it’s rare to find someone who puts as much time into a volunteer hyperlocal site as a committed football fan does into following their team.

The joy of many hyperlocal sites is that they are not slaves to traditional industrial media practices – such as a daily paper or needing to be first with news from the ersatz PR cycle.  They find their own pace that suits them and their community.   Often that’s what appeals to their readers and contributors. All of the distractions above have happened to me in Kings Cross, but the site soldiers on.  The site continues because I work with a fantastic collection of people in the neighbourhood who contribute.  They either write direct onto the site or send me or each other stuff so I can more or less copy and paste it in.  When I’ve been distracted my local colleagues often take up the slack.  And vice versa.  It’s quite normal not to hear from someone for 6 months then they pop up with a load of great stuff for the community.  We are by no means an organised team, we don’t meet up, we stay in touch on and off by email.  It works for what we do.  If i fell under the metaphorical bus tomorrow i’m not sure what would happen.  Not least because i am the only one with admin details for Typepad.com

Philip Blond’s excellent TED Global talk seeks to root or rather re-base a modern society in small local groups. I hugely enjoy working with a small group locally and this feels right to me.   In a Sunday Times interview yesterday (17 July 2011) Philip Blond said:

“There should be a web page in every community where people can post their needs, and other people can say they can help”

We’ve seen a few sites recently talking about adjusting the way the site is run in response to changing circumstances .  Richard runs the superb Saddleworth News a project while he was caring for his baby daughter.  He’s facing returning to work and has written an excellent post to discuss his options with the readers.  Over at the marvellous InsidetheM60 they are taking a short break and according to Twitter ruminating on the future.  Chris Unitt is thinking publicly about Created in Birmingham.

But this isn’t a new thing – The YamYam your source for all things Walsall went away and then came back again (see comment at link).  The Stirrer, an excellent West Midlands politics site also died and was reborn. We know of  several sites have survived or even thrived with a change of management such as Bournville Village and Blog Preston.

The web doesn’t need to have a smooth continuum. Like life, it’s a bit messy. It’s striking how many news brands can trace an almost continuous history back over 100 years. In part tied to the need to keep hugely expensive capital assets earning every day or week.  The web, with different expectations and technologies is endearingly different to the trad media.

So if you are thinking of moving on to something else or taking a break either now or in the future here’s a few things you might want to consider or prepare for it:

broaden the base of contributors – the more people you have involved in the site the greater the odds of it surviving as your ability to contribute waxes, wanes or finishes.  Have a standing invite for new contributors say

make the technology very simple and cheap

control – passing on a site is often about getting the balance of control right.  if you are too controlling it won’t survive if you have to walk away.  If you share control then there is a greater chance of someone else taking it forward

confidence and delegation – you need to be confident to share control with team members without putting them off.  This requires confidence in your team and sometimes some informal coaching

skills – try to make sure that there are more than one administrator or tech person who can run the site

personal capital – this is a tricky one – do people respond to your voice through the site or are there a range of voices people like.  In many ways a trad. media issue – do you buy a magazine for the columnists or the pictures or the info?  If the site is very much ‘yours’ then it might be harder to get others to take forward

pausing – many sites don’t publish frequently, some do reflecting local interest.  Might your site stand a long pause? In Kings Cross we hardly publish anything in August for instance when we see a traffic drop anyway.

money – you may be happy to put £10-£20 a month into your hobby (much less than a ticket to see a football match) but not everyone will be so.

Please give us some suggestions in the comments.  Thanks to Talk About Local colleagues Mike Rawlins of Pitsnpots and Nicky Getgood of Digbethisgood for their help with this  article.

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William Perrin
Founder of Talk About Local, Trustee of the Indigo Trust, Tinder Foundation, 360Giving, co-founder Connect8, former member of UK Government transparency panels, former Policy Advisor to UK Prime Minister, former Cabinet Office senior civil servant.Open data do-er, Kings Cross London blogger. Loves countryside. Two small children.
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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: hyperlocal, hyperlocal blogging, local news

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Chris says

    18th July 2011 at 1:01 pm

    Cheers Will. Some good thinking and suggestions here. I’m always hugely impressed by Pete Ashton’s propensity for starting projects and successfully passing on control of them. I’ve got a plan for CiB (more to come on that) and it’s hugely useful getting input and extra context from folks to help my thinking along.

  2. Julia Lardenj says

    18th July 2011 at 2:20 pm

    The problems described ring true for our site – and, no, there is not always someone else to take over when things get busy for the site editor. (It’s amazing how many good community activists are still technophobes & sure it’s great to teach people, but that also takes both the ‘teacher’s’ time and willingness on the part of the recipient.) Running a Twitter corner on the site can be useful. It means there are a series of quick comments up there – something for people to look at if they do log-on, telling people we are still around, still getting our point of view, and urgent info out, and, also, in reverse, still a way of telling people on Twitter about the group and the website.

  3. James Clarke says

    18th July 2011 at 2:22 pm

    Interesting article with some great pointers!

    We’re about to celebrate 2 years of our hyperlocal site next week and over that time I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that if my life outside the website gets really busy, that means the website ‘suffers’ on a short term basis.

    What I have learnt though is that this is okay – a hyperlocal site shouldn’t feel like a burden and whilst it takes a certain level of commitment to keep going, no one in the community is going to criticise or question you as they’re generally just happy that someone is creating something for them, as opposed to no one creating anything.

    We are going to have another drive to find contributors (at the moment it’s just two of us) and also a “PR blast” (send some emails) to remind all those local orgs that we’re here and can publicise their news & events for them as often the people running these orgs are doing so in the spare time as well and they forget who has helped them out over the years.

  4. Ed Walker says

    27th September 2011 at 4:31 pm

    Only just picked up on this post. Interesting piece Will and very good points made.

    I’ve had the experience of handing over my site – Blog Preston – twice, and it’s been really interesting to see what happened. The first time the person who took it over couldn’t keep going after a few months for personal reasons (although still contributes from time to time) and then I went down a similar route to Richard on Saddleworth News of getting the university involved.

    I was very lucky to get Andy Halls and Joseph Stashko involved in April 2010 and they both did a great job in helping to really push the site forward. As students at UCLan (the university in Preston) they had a lot of time to give to the site and use it as a way to test what they were learning about journalism in the classroom.

    It also taught me a lot about handing over the site to them and just saying “get on with it”. But at the same time I tried to help them out, offer advice and met up with them occasionally during visits back to Preston to see how they were going.

    Andy’s now left to work at The Sun, but Jo’s still plugging away. As he’s in his final year and I’ve decided to get a bit more involved in the site again we haven’t added an extra co-editor, but instead we’ve broadened the base of contributors – with someone taking on Preston North End coverage for example.

    What happens when Jo finishes, well that remains to be seen – but I’m sure I can find someone new to take it on. Certainly having a university in town helps when trying to find people to help, but perhaps not in the long-run as students will nearly always leave town…

Trackbacks

  1. Talk About Local » Hyperlocal exit strategy says:
    12th January 2012 at 9:43 am

    […] Perrin wrote about the ‘hyperlocal life cycle‘ in July 2011 asking ‘what makes hyperlocal sites resilient?’ The answer was a […]

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