Richard Jones wrote previously on this blog about his experiences setting up his own hyperlocal service, Saddleworth News. Here he explains the strengths of hyperlocal coverage compared to conventional local media and why he ultimately decided he couldn't make a living from it.
As a journalist, in my experience, editors are full of reasons why you shouldn't cover a particular story. Reporters at all levels will be familiar with responses along the lines of 'I'm not interested in that' or 'we don't do that kind of story' or 'we covered that last week/month/year.'
But as both the journalist and the editor of Saddleworth News I didn't have to worry about such whims. I had the freedom to stick with ongoing local issues, such as a continuing row over the future of the running track at a playing field.
After a packed public meeting on the issue, the local paper put the story on its front page - but then rarely covered it again for months, presumably because of an editorial view that it had been 'done'.
But I reported every new angle, however small, and quickly built up a mass of material that couldn't be matched anywhere else. In every article I linked back to all of my previous coverage, putting each new development into context.
This meant that if a reader was new to the debate they could easily find lots more information and views about it. It's the sort of context which is all too often missing from reporting, whether it's the parish council or Israel/Palestine debate.
Obviously you can't put a hyperlink in a newspaper, but even newspaper websites are often reluctant to include them - either because of corporate decisions to try to prevent readers clicking onto other websites or because journalists simply don't know much about what links are or how to use them.
Whatever the differences, hyperlocal sites also face the problem exercising managers, bean counters and journalists at news operations around the country and the world. The problem of money.
I'm a journalist, not a salesman. And I found selling ads on Saddleworth News difficult. Despite my site's reach of more than 20,000 unique users per month in an area of only 24,000 people, it was hard to persuade the butcher and the baker of the value of taking an ad: much easier for them to do what they've always done and use the glossy magazines or the daily paper.
Most of the ads I did sell were to people who used the website as readers and had their own small online businesses. But I only ever made £150 a month from ads - a paltry return given that I had extended the time I spent writing it to two hours every weekday.
When my daughter turned two and we wanted to start putting her into nursery for at least a couple of days each week, I thought about trying to make Saddleworth News my full-time job. Had I been 22, I might have given it a go, but with a family and a mortgage gambling isn't so attractive.
I would have needed to increase my income from the site at least tenfold to start to make it viable as a career, which would have meant spending all of my time chasing cash rather than chasing stories.
And there was no guarantee that even if I became financially successful others wouldn't simply seek to copy me. Partly inspired by the perceived success of Saddleworth News, other local people had already established sites focusing on events listings and Groupon-style daily deals for local shops and restaurants - not competing with me for content but certainly competing for advertising money.
That helps explain why it was an easy decision to give it up and get back into more traditional work, including lecturing. I had various options for the site, but all but one would have had me continuing to do Saddleworth News for little reward. Most involved bolting on some kind of paid-for business directory to the site, while a freesheet offered me a very small sum to republish my stories. Thanks, but no thanks.
So, I chose the best offer I had and passed the site to University Campus Oldham, part of the University of Huddersfield. A journalism student is now writing Saddleworth News as a final year project.
Hyperlocal websites have a future. Of course they do. There's no reason why well-intentioned local residents shouldn't set up a website and fill it with details of coffee mornings and church services - much as people have long been producing parish newsletters.
But I'm sceptical about whether hyperlocal journalism of a professional standard has any more of a future than newspaper journalism. For all the benefits of hyperlocal reporting, the cash crisis facing other parts of our trade is there too.
Working on Saddleworth News was fun and frustrating, exciting and boring, illuminating and tedious - just like journalism is. But I'm afraid it didn't get me any closer to a model which will keep reporters in the councils and courtrooms.
Richard Jones (@rlwjones) is a freelance journalist, blogger about journalism and visiting lecturer in online at the University of Leeds.
This article is adapted with kind permission from What Do We Mean by Local? Grass-roots Journalism - Its Death and Rebirth, edited by John Mair, Neil Fowler and Ian Reeves and, published by Abramis.
The BBC College of Journalism is hosting a conference about community media, in Salford on 24 May: details here.
