yelvington.com

For as long as there have been J-schools, professors have been telling their students to refrain from projecting their personal experiences onto the world they're covering. At least I hope that's still going on. But judging from the responses to Jeff Jarvis' "Local lives" post, a lot of people seem to be forgetting how to do that.

Jeff's point: Local is very important, full of opportunity, and very hard to do.

The responses fall into two clear camps. One camp agrees hyperlocal is important. The other thinks local is dead and it's all about hyper-me. Me, me, me.

Here's the thing. For most people, there is no difference between hyperlocal and hyper-me, because most real people live very local lives.

I do not. Lately I'm acutely aware of how little I actually live where I live. I have a well-stamped passport, gold status on Skymiles, friends scattered around the planet. I dare not assume that other people are having the same 21st century virtual experience that I'm having with my wifi connections and my global-roaming text messages.

I get the point about hyper-me, I really do, but I also know that most people live locally. And for them, hyper-me and hyperlocal largely overlap.

Human beings need connections. We're hardwired that way. But modern life gets in the way. TV and the automobile sell us connections but deliver isolation. Stand at a street corner and count the cars with drivers talking on their cellphones. They're fighting back.

I'm looking at some proprietary research from one city where fully 38 percent of women who were interviewed reported that connecting was their biggest personal challenge.

Virtual connections through a social networking platform are better than no connections at all, but the real opportunity, I think, is in virtual connections that are combined with real connections. Physical-world connections. Hyperlocal space.

While I was traveling Backfence.com suspended operations, and now a lot of people are drawing conclusions, some publicly and some not. At the risk of further muddying the water, here are some of my own fairly random, jetlagged thoughts:

First of all, we should expect and even welcome failure. The trick is to fail forward and inexpensively. The Innosight folks counsel us to "be patient for scale, but impatient for profits." What that means is that we should make sure the business model works before pumping cash into it. We need more and faster failures that help us find a model that works, and only then pour significant money into the machine. This is easy to say and incredibly hard to do when a gaggle of competitors are launching nationwide.

It's still early in the game and the game is changing quickly. For example, the Backfence folks sunk a lot of energy and some significant amount of money into creating a technology platform after struggling with an early version of Drupal; by the time they actually launched with proprietary software, open-source Drupal had raced ahead. As this stuff gets technically easier and cheaper, you can expect a lot more experimentation. Someone is going to get it right. Someone may be getting it right this week.

We still don't know the right scale for doing this sort of thing, and that scale may actually be shifting as more people sign up for cheap broadband and become comfortable with creating and not just consuming content. Backfence cofounder Mark Potts once speculated in a conversation that the right physical community size is under 50,000. We've had great debates about that where I work; one point of view says a local high school district can serve as a useful proxy for defining a natural community, but your mileage may vary.

A successful community model and a successful business model are not the same thing. The tricky part is going to involve finding the intersection. Something like Front Porch Forum might have a great community model but never be able to make a significant profit, or vice versa. Or the right business model might involve delivery of a print component, something many Web-centric developers might overlook or avoid.

Everybody underestimates how hard and how expensive it is to build a powerful brand at a geographic community level. If you went down the street in one of Backfence's markets and knocked on doors, how many people would have a strong, clear, positive notion of what Backfence was all about and why they should use it? This is one place where incumbent, offline media may have a great advantage, although in many cases it can't deliver the message to the targets of greatest opportunity (nonconsumers).

See also comments from:

Peter Krasilovsky
Scott Karp
Amy Gahran
Paul Farhi
Terry Heaton
Dan Gillmor
Steve Outing
... and many more

Jeff Jarvis observes that hyperlocal is about people, not the tools used to connect those people. This is exactly right. I've been using the example of Robin Dunbar's number to explain this to newspaperfolk for some time.

For most people the little circle of 150 close friends and relatives is still primarily geographically local, and it's a circle that conventional media serves poorly if at all. The Web gives us some great new tools for penetrating that circle, but we shouldn't confuse our tools with our purposes.

It occurs to me that there's another shift that needs examination, and that's about the constructive social role played by media, whether it be yours, mine, or ours. I am still seeing a tendency to launch "hyperlocal community" websites with little attention being paid to the interpersonal processes of real community.

It's not enough to get people blogging or uploading news stories or whatever. The real goal needs to be social capital formation that is external to the website, and it's entirely appropriate to be using tools other than the Web to reach that goal. Those tools include physical-space meetings and in-person processes, and print-related components.

Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its report, "The State of the News Media 2007," and I'd really like to read it before commenting on it. Unfortunately I didn't make it past the first page of the 38-page executive summary before stumbling over this sentence:

For some, the new brand is what Wall Street calls “hyper localism” (consider the end of foreign bureaus at the Boston Globe or the narrowing of the coverage area at the Atlanta Journal Constitution).

No, no no! That's not hyperlocal. Not even close.

The Boston Globe doesn't do hyperlocal -- not yet, anyway. (They've hired innovator Bob Kempf from hyperlocal competitor WickedLocal.com.)

And as for the AJC, all it did was stop delivering the paper to remote towns where almost nobody was reading the paper anyway. What does that have to do with hyperlocalism? If anything AJC is moving the opposite direction, reducing the numbers of locally zoned editions and enlarging the zones.

There's a lot of good material in this year's report, but not on this topic.

MyClaySun.com launched today in Clay County, Florida, just west of Jacksonville. The blogs-for-all website is coupled with a four-day newspaper, around 30,000 distribution. The website has a couple of nits here and there that the tech team is still chasing down, but the community interaction seems to be off to a good start.

It's public now: We're launching another "daily" hyperlocal product, this one in a western suburb of Jacksonville, Fla., called MyClay Sun. It will have a four-day print publication schedule, "daily on the Web," with a participative community website. Some elements will be very similar to Bluffton Today, but there also will be some significant differences. Launch date is the middle of next month.

A few weeks ago the word was that the Los Angeles Times' "Manhattan project" (renamed "Spring Street") report had disappeared into the bureaucracy, never to be seen again. But it resurfaced today full of fury in a major shakeup outlined by Staci Kramer at paidContent.org. This is a big deal, and is especially remarkable considering the conditions under which it's happening. Ordinarily, when a company is on the auction block, paralysis ensues -- not radical change.

I've written about the Los Angeles Times previously. It is the poster child for the endangered metro newspaper, and it's significant that Rob Barrett, who "wanted to go hyperlocal," has come out on top. Our Bluffton Today was one of the case studies examined by Times reporters in their research. Can the Times be a newspaper of national stature and a family of hyperlocal, personally relevant products? This is going to be interesting.