yelvington.com

Not long ago someone suggested I might be an isolationist, based on something I had written about the fading role of world and national news and the rise of hyperlocalism in newspapers.

I took my wife and my youngest daughter to the airport Monday, where they turned a hundred thousand of my frequent-flier miles into a trip to Europe. We will spend our Christmas holiday separated by thousands of miles because we believe it's that important for young people to get a broader view of the world than they can get by staying home.

Except for a weekend in Canada, I didn't travel internationally until I was over 40. Now I can't get enough of it, and everyone in my family is collecting visa stamps in their passports.

One of my great frustrations is that, like most Americans, I can't carry on a conversation in any language other than English. I had to turn down a potential gig in Madrid the other day because my Castellano is fit only for ordering una cerveza, por favor. My relationship with half a dozen other languages is similar.

There is, however, an isolationist streak in American culture, and when it collides with the reality of a rapidly shrinking world the results can be ugly. You can see that in the anti-Hispanic immigration backlash being exploited by the crass TV demagogue Lou Dobbs, but equally in the ignorant arrogance that has led to the bloody chaos in Iraq and the downfall of America as a world leader. I don't want my kids to grow up so handicapped.

So I'm a bit of an internationalist. But at the same time I recognize that we all live simultaneously in multiple worlds.

I have a work world, a family world, a neighborhood world, a number of worlds of special interests, and in each of those worlds I have different needs for current and persistent information, connections, and commercial interaction. Some of those worlds are hyperlocal; others may be hyperspecialized.

The problem faced by "general" news organizations is that they fit poorly into a matrix of specialization. American newspapers in particular are poorly suited to specialization. They evolved in an information economy (and entertainment economy) of scarcity. In the 19th century a daily printed product was an exciting breakthrough in bandwidth; in the 21st it's a puny little trickle.

Yet most American newspapers continue to operate on the omnibus model, dumping onto the doorstep (or, more often, throwing into the driveway) a mashup of local, regional, national and global news, sports and business coverage. It is a stew suited to an earlier era, one that is consumed not to satisfy needs but rather to satisfy a fading habit.

I believe American newspapers need a complete restructuring of journalism priorities and processes. When I advocate hyperlocalism, it's not because I lack interest in global topics; it's that I believe newspapers must specialize to survive.

The local and hyperlocal spaces in which we all live are full of unmet and poorly met needs in the areas of information and connectivity/communications. Those areas constitute opportunities. Who will focus their resources on them?

One of the more self-destructive traits of American journalism is the general disdain of local reporting. In the news biz there is a pecking order, and second-worst place to be is a suburban bureau. The absolutely worst place to be is a newspaper so small that it doesn't have any suburban bureaus.

Writing for Slate, media commentator Jack Schafer piles it on, saying newspapers that focus on local news are "dumbing down" and "targeting a less-educated audience."

Smaller and more locally focused newspapers happen to be the only happy story in print journalism these days.

The bigger the newspaper, the more it stuffs its columns full of wire news that everyone already knows about in this internetworked world we live in, the more likely it is that the paper's having horrendous circulation troubles.

Churn rates at many major metro papers exceed half the subscriber base. In other words, for every 100,000 subscribers, more than 50,000 cancel every year and have to be replaced (at great marketing expense). Many major dailies now reach only two out of ten households in their own circulation areas. They're not treading water; they're sinking fast.

It's the smaller markets that are solid -- the ones where newspapers are full of the local news that allegedly dumbs down the paper so that it appeals to the hicks in flyover country.

Schafer quotes a study by two economists of the effects on local newspaper circulation when the New York Times enters the market with home delivery. I'd like to see a detailed analysis by age cohort. Perhaps this is just evidence that the New York Times is becoming a specialty newsletter for the elite and elderly.

Yahoo News has launched local pages for metropolitan areas across the United States, aggregating local news from RSS feeds and via screen-scraping. Users of Yahoo's personalization tools will get a link that aggregates their hometown news by default, and a cluster of local headlines on the news.yahoo.com page.

The typical local page uses RSS feeds to pull in headlines and summaries from half a dozen sites, each linking back to the site (through a clickthrough counter) for story views. For each participating website, there's also a a site-specific RSS aggregation page on Yahoo.

All of this is separate from the personalized my.yahoo.com page, which is conceptually more of a Web-based RSS reader than a news portal system.

Sites with tight registration requirements or restrictive RSS usage policies are being left off the bus. This means that in some metro areas, the major local newspaper may be missing.

Yahoo has been negotiating registration changes for some major sites in order to include them, asking that Yahoo visitors be allowed to click through without having to register on the destination sites.

Threat or opportunity?

Probably not much of either. MSNBC has been doing local pages for years, working directly with local TV stations and newspapers long before RSS became a factor. It didn't seem to have a tremendous effect one way or the other. Yahoo's effort may be somewhat stronger, as it includes more sources, but I don't see it as radically different.

All of this is part of an inevitable pattern. The Internet makes it possible to disintegrate content and to reintegrate it in new ways. Screen-scrapers, RSS feeds, search engines, feed readers, and socially driven link aggregators (Slashdot, Digg) aren't going away.

My advice to local news sites: Get your own house in order.

Users will choose and use multiple jumping-off points. The choice will be driven by quality of experience.

If your homepage is ugly, cluttered and overloaded with hucksterism, you shouldn't be surprised if many users flee to the sterile organization of Yahoo Local. If your site offers poor opportunities for interaction, then you shouldn't be surprised if many users migrate to Topix or one of the many local discussion sites that are popping up all over the country. If you don't engage with local bloggers and photographers, don't be surprised to find a version of Greensboro101 in your own backyard, or a big locally focused Flickr pool.

Do a great job. Earn your way. Make your users fall in love with your site.