JeffCroft.com

06.04.2008 // 4 CommentsBig Daily’s ‘Hyperlocal’ Flop

Big Daily's 'Hyperlocal' Flop

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on LoudounExtra.com, the hyperlocal piece Rob Curley and his team put together while at The Washington Post’s interactive subsidiary. WSJ calls the site a “flop” and talks at length about how Rob and his team failed to generate even the traffic they got in Lawrence, which has three times fewer residents than Loudoun County.

I have no idea why the site never generated the traffic numbers they were hoping for, but I definitely don’t believe this should be taken as an indication that hyperlocal is no longer a good strategy. But news organizations should also understand that hyperlocal is also not a magic bullet. There are many other factors at play when it comes to figuring out if one of the sites is going to succeed or not, and chances are no one — not even Rob F’ing Curley — has the midas touch to ensure every single project they work on is going to be a mega-hit.

One thing is for sure, though: sites can not continue to be successful simply by being LJWorld.com and Lawrence.com clones. Teams need to continue to innovate and come up with new and interesting ways to get the news in front of consumers. The biggest thing Lawrence.com did was something different. Lawrence.com has been basically exactly the same site since its inception in 2001. This was Rob’s vision, and it was executed very, very well. Since then, it has forged a plethora of clones across all sorts of markets — some successful, and some not. Seven years in Internet time is an eternity, and I don’t mind saying that because I know the guys working on Lawrence.com now understand it’s a project that drastically needs to redefine itself, and its place as one of the most innovative interactive news projects ever launched (I have it on good word that redefinition is coming in the relatively near future).

Bottom line? Being “hyperlocal” isn’t enough to get you anywhere, anymore. You need to be innovative and captivating. As much as I respect the team behind LoudounExtra.com, I’m not entirely sure it upped the ante any.

Visit site:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121253859877343291.html

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  1. 001 // Justin Lilly // 06.04.2008 // 4:45 PM

    So any ideas on how to foster a team that innovates? There are a small group of us at the paper who are excited about doing something different, but without buy in from the newsroom, advertising and, more importantly, our manager.. I’m not convinced it’ll be what it can.

  2. 002 // Nathan Borror // 06.05.2008 // 8:06 AM

    @Justin - Don’t ask for permission :)

  3. 003 // Deryck Hodge // 06.05.2008 // 10:38 AM

    Hi, Jeff.

    I was a programmer on Rob’s team at the Post, and worked on Loudoun Extra as well as a number of other projects.

    While I agree that Loudoun doesn’t up the ante as it stands today, I do think that we were very actively trying to “innovate and come up with new and interesting ways to get the news in front of consumers.” It’s just that we were doing this across a number of projects rather than solely with Loudoun Extra. We created onBeing, which was innovative in terms of serving video, the flash player, and the type of personal journalism not yet seen on the Post. We were among the first to launch a Facebook Platform app, (and we continued to experiment with how to best use Facebook), and we had a really slick user publishing system for Loudoun that leveraged community sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook, which never saw the light of day due to the Post’s legal department.

    And we had success at these things. Our first Facebook app was in the top 5 apps for several months and still has over 300,000 installed users. onBeing was serving more video than all of the other videos on the Post combined for several weeks after it’s launch.

    This is the one issue I take with the WSJ article. While it’s criticisms of Loudoun are valid and worth discussing, it’s incorrect to imply that our group’s work at the Post was a “flop” or to infer too much of a judgment on our group from that one site alone.

  4. 004 // Jeff Croft // 06.05.2008 // 2:40 PM

    Hey, Deryck-

    Forst off, I’ll say it again: I have a ton of respect for all that you guys have done. With that out of the way:

    1. onBeing was awesome, and definitely innovative and “upped the ante” in my opinion. I didn’t really consider it part of LoudounExtra, though — but maybe I was missing something.
    2. Same goes for the Facebook app. I enver really used it, but I didn’t realize it had anything to do with LoudounExtra.com — if it did, then it would definitely qualify as something new and innovative. If it didn’t, then it’s still awesome, but outside the scope of my comments above. :)
    3. I fully admit that I never spent a ton of time on LoudounExtra.com. The content isn’t that interesting to me. :) So, most of my observations about it not seeming especially innovative are definitely from the perspective of someone who just looked at it with broad strokes, not with a fine-toothed comb. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there are innovative bits in there I never saw.

    I definitely didn’t intend to criticize your group as a whole — overall, I know you guys do great work. My comments about a lack of innovation were definitely targeted just at LoudounExtra.com.

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