State of Local

With the introduction of Apple’s 3G iPhone & iPhone App Store on July 11, NowLocal debuted as the first news application. We saw tremendous interest from iPhone users – as NowLocal has since become the 5^th most popular news app on iTunes. Equally impressive was the attention garnered by bloggers and trade press:

• Time.com’s Top 11 iPhone Applications
• TMC.net
• Lost Remote
• The Frager Factor
• Somewhat Frank
• MinnPost.com

Ultimately designed as an application for publishers, NowLocal is a local news aggregation tool that detects the user’s location and provides a feed of local stories from thousands of local news sources.  As a user changes location, NowLocal automatically updates the feed of stories based on their new location, providing hyper-local news results from the most trusted relevant local sources. 

For IB, the iPhone app was a great opportunity for us to leverage new technology, understand the needs of the market and adapt in order to provide the best tools to help consumers find the news and information they depend upon.

If you haven’t had a chance to see NowLocal yet, be sure to check out this quick demo.

MSN Live Search, which has been trailing Google by around 60 percentage points in usage over the past few months, unveiled a direct competitor to Google’s news aggregator this week. Live Search News was first reported by CNet on Tuesday night. The Live Search Blog has yet to announce the launch.

As a user, you get a simple main column of top stories that appears to be accurately detecting duplicates and suggesting relateds. A right sidebar highlights news from local sources, presumably by detecting my IP. It got my state right, but all eight stories are from the same source: the local CBS TV station. It’s odd, because while some major local publications are being left out of the index entirely, several others are in — and just not listed as local.

So as a publisher, the first thing to do is make sure your site is included in the results. You can use the site: operator command to view the stories on your domain that Live has in its index.

For example, most of our Internet Broadcasting sites are doing well. The top results for WNBC, Channel3000 and Click2Houston are all fairly recent — not “live,” but within the past hour or two. (Strangely, all three have exactly 126 results.) Read More… »

The official Google News blog did a post today to confirm/deny some truths/rumors about how it indexes and ranks stories.

It’s important to note that these learnings apply only to Google News results, not to Google Web results. (Here at Internet Broadcasting, the Web:News referral ratio for our sites is about 25:1.) Still, Google News accounts for a lot of traffic, and it’s something for which we optimize and about which we school our editors.

Most notable to me in this post:

1. Google News only visits a story once. It never comes back to check for updates. (The Google Web spiders, of course, will return.) This could bite local publishers in the treatment of developing news, when it might be easier to rewrite an existing story, rather than create a new one. For example, your site may say Barbaro is dead, but your Google News snippet will forever read that the horse is merely ailing.

Our recommendation would be that if the news significantly changes — headline and nut graph — it’s best to create a new story with a new URL and link to the previous one(s) for context. Read More… »

Billionaire investor Phil Anschutz, the moneyman behind the Examiner newspapers, is making a big push into local news online.

Anschutz, a sugar daddy for conservative Christian causes, created a media stir in 2004 when he bought the San Francisco Examiner and converted it into a free daily tabloid.

After his Clarity Media unit launched dead-tree freebies in Baltimore and Washington D.C. and locked up the Examiner brand name in cities across the county, some industry observers wondered if Anschutz aimed to remake the print media landscape in his image.

But it’s become clear the Examiner empire’s real focus is digital local news. Examiner.com has launched sites in 59 cities and hired former AOL executive Michael Sherrod as CEO of its internet operations. More tellingly, Examiner.com is hiring “city editors” in some of the markets to produce local content and cultivate a network of homegrown contributors. Read More… »

The Project For Excellence In Journalism has issued its annual “State Of The Media” report, and there are a number of good takeaway points that are applicable to any local news organization. But as is always the case with this type of report, take all the points as interesting nuggets of information, rather than the complete story of the state of the media.

The two points getting the most attention involve audiences and advertising.

The good news for the news business is that audiences are continuing to shift the attentions online, and the traditional media outlets are grabbing larger percentages of the market than they did in the offline world. But the downside of the story is that while the online news audience is thriving, the advertising side of the equation hasn’t kept pace. Content and advertising are increasingly becoming uncoupled, and that only increases the bottom line problems for many so-called “legacy” news organizations.

Here are a few of the highlights from the report (which really should be read in its entirety):

Increasingly, news is moving from a traditional story-based presentation to a world of options. Audiences are moving toward information on demand, to media platforms and outlets that can tell them what they want to know when they want to know it.
Read More… »

The American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next project has released a report on the state of newspapers and how their role is changing.

One key finding is that readers are increasingly searching for information that is pertinent to them rather than what just would traditionally be thought of as “news.” The report advises newspapers to become “a local information and connection utility.”

As you read the 100-plus page report, it becomes clear that many of the problems and possible solutions are also applicable to Internet Broadcasting’s broadcast TV clients. Like newspapers, they’ve struggled to grow or even retain their local online audiences, with mixed results.

The study observes that the most common solution among newspapers is to offer up ideas which offer added value to current readers, instead of developing ways to bring in new eyeballs. Things like video are mentioned in this category, and we suspect that if our industry had the metrics to prove it, the same would be the case with visitors to our sites, and those of our competitors.
Read More… »