Out With A Bang

For a fair while now, I’ve kind of worked on the basis that this web world of ours will go one of two ways… you’ll either be hyper-national a la The Telegraph, The Guardian, et al…

… or you’ll be hyper-local. A la Linda at www.darwenreporter.com And James at www.towcesternews.co.uk

And there won’t be too much left in-between. As there isn’t where the Rocky Mountain News once lived.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=56

How The Telegraph, The Guardian et al fund their hyper-national stroke global efforts, I’ve no idea. Not any of my business. I’m a bottom of the pond dweller; not a water lily.

But clearly that’s where both they and, in fairness, The Daily Mail, are head – into the US; invading their web-space like there’s no tomorrow.

And, sure, at some point – at that kind of level – they probably will need to come to some new arrangement with the Googles and the Yahoos of this world.

A deal that the Lindas and James’ of this world won’t have to unduly worry about; after all, for the Googles of this world, the Linda and James’ are mere grains of sand in this great Holkham Beach world of ours.

The people who, in every likelihood, are off to meet their maker sooner than most are those that find themselves being neither one thing nor the other.

I haven’t checked; might be wrong. But I suspect for right or left-leaning middle America http://www.mirror.co.uk/ holds little obvious appeal. They don’t do football and they don’t do ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.

And as a result, maybe, across the Pond is not where TrinityMirror’s future lies.

Two events today have – IMHO – only reinforced this impression.

One is the fact that Linda and her www.darwenreporter.com hyper-local news website are due to make their TV debut on Sky Business News tomorrow lunchtime [c12.30pm...] as they debate ‘Where next?’ for local news; and, presumeably, think that Linda’s admirable efforts to empower the people of Darwen with a new, digital news service is worthy of Mr Murdoch’s air-time…

And, yes, obviously we’ve got an interest. Addiply is – in part – helping Linda to achieve that aim.

Over the course of the last three weeks we’ve now empowered her to cover her monthly hosting costs and maybe the odd mobile phone bill as her decision to charge her hyper-local advertisers £5 per week for a space on her site begins to bear a little fruit.

It is, you hope, the kind of little experiment that Clay Shirky would thoroughly approve of; it is, hopefully, the kind of little experiment that we can bring to the streets of Digbeth or the suburbs of San Francisco.

So much for Sky thinking: ‘Mmm… you know what? Hyper-local might be where the action is…’

The other confirmation that the world won’t do anyone who occupies the killing ground of ‘provincial’ came from the lips of Sly Bailey this afternoon as she said her piece to the Digital Britain gathering.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/17/sly-bailey-newspaper-websites-digital-britain

There are some interesting lines therein… that UK national newspapers have been the masters – or mistresses – of their own, potential downfall…

‘By creating gargantuan national newspaper websites designed to harness users by the tens of millions, by performing well on search engines like Google, we have eroded the value of news,” she said.

But, for me, Ms Bailey’s problem is that the Mirror can’t compete on the same playing field as The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Mail… it won’t command the same level of fleeting attention on the sidewalks of Brooklyn as The Guardian might.

In a global, hyper-national sense, it’s too provincial.

But at the other end of our emerging spectrum, neither can it pull off the hyper-local trick either.

It can be as hyper-local as you like in TS10. That’s great. And in the suburbs of Coventry and Brum. But – right now – it can’t do what it can in TS10 in NR14.

Cos Norfolk is in someone else’s silo. Just as BN3 is in NewsQuest’s. And BS6 is in Northcliffe’s.

But Yahoo can. Google can. RightMove can. Monster can. Cos they’re all networks.

I can find a house or a job in any postcode in this country without ever having to resort to remembering whether I should be looking at Jobs24 when I’m in Archant land, ThisIsBristolJobs if I’m in Northcliffe’s…

So, for me, there is two ways of looking at Ms Bailey’s demand that OfCom et al sweep away those restrictions on local media ownership. For if her aim is to get a Trinity-Johnston combo on the statute books as soon as humanly possible, she’s still not replicating the RightMove model – not if Archcliffe is carving up the West Country and East Anglia between them…

‘Any merger regime which does not take Google, Yahoo, Rightmove and Monster into account simply isn’t fit for purpose,” she said.

Quite right.

Cos Trinston and Archcliffe don’t take Google, Yahoo, RightMove and Monster into account.

And on that basis, Trinston and Archcliffe aren’t fit for the purpose of delivering a networked, local news platform that befits a Digital Britain.

They don’t fit. And that’s Sly’s problem.

�