These days, the presence of the super-local on the world wide web has become more and more obvious as Internet users can punch in a postal code, and come up with the food safety inspection results for the local pub and tavern, or the location and severity of the fire which sent a firetruck blazing through the neighborhood the other night.
Citizen Journalism: News as It Happens
You can find out which film is being shot in the park and whether or not Robert DeNiro is in town. There's more of course. 'Citizen Journalists' can post videos and pictures taken from their cell phones. There can be audio and video recordings of a new local artist, local restaurant reviews and guides to the best businesses in town.
The newest trend in the news is the hyper-local. A new Google application, for example, 'Who is Sick?', allows users to report their symptoms and geographically check the health of the region around them. There's also 'We Feel Fine,' which (somehow) collects data from blogs all over North America and organizes them by mood or emotion.
Mapping is a large focus for many of these microsites; there are sites with mapping features which allow you to plan a low-surveillance route of travel, see your house from multiple angles. But it can go much deeper than that. Much, much deeper. At Worldmapper.org, you can select world maps that display or reflect various statistics pertaining to 336 areas of interest.
Linkfluence's Map of the Political Blogosphere is comprised of a visual network of blue, red, purple and yellow bubbles, each of which represent liberal, conservative or “moderate” bloggers. It is intricate, original and completely unnecessary, but perhaps that is part of its charm.
Microsites don't have to be flashy, or exhaustively specific. They can in many cases simply be an assortment of news clips taken from mainstream media outlets, government agencies or other sites similar in purpose or origin. The point is that they have become prevalent, and although there is still not unanimous agreement on precisely what role they are playing, or are going to play, there is agreement that they have affected the business models of the conventional local media in some way or another.
A Shift From Print to Digital?
In many cases, the owners of the microsites seek to replace the community newspaper entirely. The question is, 'how successful have they been in that endeavor so far?' Is the local daily about to debut as an endangered species?
The Knight News Challenge, sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is a contest which awards up to $5 million in grants to multiple contestants “for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.” The recipients of the whopping $5 million prize for 2007 were Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Mitchell Resnick and Henry Jenkins, for their Center for Future Civic Media project.
The project is designed to “encourage community news experiments” and technologies and practices. The masterminds behind the venture have some rather lofty expectations for it. “Local papers seem doomed, as do indeed many bigger papers as well. At [the] Center for Future Civic Media, we're trying to create new systems and techniques for doing much of what papers used to do, but in a way that doesn't necessarily resemble papers, or even journalism,” says Csikszentmihaly.
“In some cases our techniques do resemble journalism, but in some cases it might look more like a union, like activism, or like civics. But whatever we do, we can't let local journalism die without figuring out how to help people in a given community understand their interests, act on them, and speak truth to power.”
