Out With A Bang

For obvious reasons, this is clearly worth keeping an eye – The Huffington Post does local…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/19/digitalmedia.pressandpublishing

The two key pars of Ms Kiss’ piece come at the top…

“The Huffington Post is planning to expand into local news across the US, founder Arianna Huffington said last night, beginning with a site edited for the community of Chicago.

“Huffington said the Chicago site would aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources as well as contributions from bloggers in what will be the first of a series of projects in “dozens of US cities”. The Chicago site will initially be curated by just one editor…”

How well developed these plans are, I’ve no idea. And since I wasn’t at the latest Guardian debate and know both Adam and Eve better than I do Ms Huffington, in a way it feels slightly churlish to cast doubts on what might be no more than some back-of-fag-packet thoughts on what appears to be the Huffington Post’s take on ‘local’.

Chicago.

As in Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit and New York, presumeably, given that the Chicago ‘local’ site will be the first project to emerge from ‘dozens of US cities’.

All, presumeably, managed, monitored and moderated by one person, a la Chicago model.

It’s a fascinating idea. In theory.

My first port of call would be the name. What’s in a name? Well, for me, everything. Cos somewhere in the name has to be a network; from there you get elegant organistion; from there you get the capacity to cascade national advertising down and higher portal content up.

So, I guess www.huffingtonpost.com/chicago would be a good place to start; it has ‘mother’ in the shape of www.huffingtonpost.com and then the opportunity to elegantly drop a ‘long tail’ down off that particular water lily.

An, lo and behold, there it is…. ‘Chicago News and Opinion on The Huffington Post’… tremendous. My page doesn’t load that well, but maybe that’s me and my browser. The thought is there – and that’s what counts.

And it’s an important thought. Again, for obvious reasons, I’ve been pondering Trinity Mirror’s ‘Banter’ football blog roll-out of late; as any potential competitor would.

As in www.evertonbanter.co.uk www.liverpoolbanter.co.uk etc… Next in line, we’re told, is the Newcastle United and Birmingham City ‘Banter’ versions running out of the Trinity stable and beyond… They’d be stupid not to, after all.

But, for me, there needs to be a ‘mother’; www.footballbanter.co.uk/everton for example…

Which makes this interesting…

http://client.amenworld.com/whois_simple.php?domaine=FOOTBALLBANTER.CO.UK

Because for me Lammtara Multiserve Limited are – wittingly or not – sitting on a decent piece of web real estate there. Perhaps they’re TrinityMirror in disguise; in which case, fair play.

This space – http://www.banter.co.uk/ – appears to be taken.

But we digress.

Because the other interesting point about the whole Huffington Post effort is the idea that one person can do Chicago; maybe that’s a budgetry issue that is about to be made redundant by their next round of funding. In which case, good luck…

But if we go back to the whole LoudonExtra does Loudon County debate and Rob Curley’s efforts out of the Washington Post – http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=85 – and part of the lesson would, from a great distance, appear to be the fact that Curley and his team of reporters didn’t ‘engage’ sufficiently with their ‘local’ community – a community that was 520 square miles of rolling Virginia countryside, Dulles International Airport and the HQ of America Online.

This wasn’t Chicago.

This was Loudon County. There wasn’t a city, as such, in sight.

But even then LoudonExtra, one argument might suggest, was too unwieldy, too disparate and too fractured socially, economically and geographically to ‘fit’ into a ‘local’ news site of the Washington Post’s grand design.

Yes, www.huffingtonpost.com/chicago has an excellent starting point in terms of aggregating in the kind of rich data streams that Adrian Holovaty’s baby EveryBlock delivers – and, remember, this was his original ‘beat’ with ChicagoCrime.org hence http://chicago.everyblock.com/ will be a richer source of data material than most – but to mould that into a readable and engaging form by yourself?

A big ask. A big, big ask. Even for an organisation as formidable and as driven as the HuffPost.

�