Hyper-local coverage elevates local media

By Cecilia Campbell

Chief Marketing Officer

United Robots

Malmö, Sweden

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There's a particularly compelling theme running through our - local - corner of the news publishing industry this year. I come back to it in this blog regularly. It's about how publishing (and distributing) content on a hyper-local level creates particular engagement with and value for your readers.

Of course, it's generally true that your unique selling proposition (USP) as a local publisher is "local" - providing all that journalism and information that is unique and relevant to the communities you serve. What we hear from many local publishers is the more granularly you can match content to readers, the more compelling your offer.

United Robots supports Innovate Local, a relatively new programme of which I am a co-founder and the editor. My work mainly involves finding great local cases for our biweekly webinars.

I had an "aha moment" of sorts talking to project manager Lea Nowack at Tamedia ahead of one of those Webinars earlier this year. Her case was about how the Swiss group creates and publishes specific local newsletters for communities of as little as 5,000 people. It does this by automating the scraping of data and information from municipality Web sites, among other things.

"I understand that your aim was to efficiently create hyper-local newsletters," I said. "But what was the higher goal - why did you do it?"

Nowack didn't miss a beat: "Because we need to differentiate ourselves from other regional and local publishers. And no one else publishes content on such a hyper-local level."

Tamedia currently publishes 27 weekly local newsletters and automated e-mail updates for more than 700 municipalities. Since the start of the project, 120,000 people have subscribed to the newsletters and e-mails, which means the publisher reaches up to 40% of inhabitants in local communities. The team also had an unexpected surprise: "We are bringing new people to our Web site, because many newsletter subscribers are print readers that have never used our digital platforms before," Nowack said.

Amedia in Norway is another publisher with a razor-sharp focus on hyper-local. It has 120 local news titles spread over its geographically large but relatively sparsely populated country.

Tasked with making sure all titles have enough journalism and content to fill its sites on a daily basis, Amedia's central team has created a platform for turning publicly available data into hyper-local content. It has also built tools for journalists to turn the data into deeper stories about their communities.

"One of the key findings that we've made is that the more local a news title's content and its distribution are, the more relevant it is to readers and the better are its numbers. Hyper-local news with the right timing and context really works, and reader numbers and sales suffer if publications become stale and static," said Markus Rask Jensen, director of news, presenting the case to the Innovate Local community and emphasising that hyper-local trumps local.

Rask Jensen pointed out that a lot of the value in Amedia's content lies in the combination of the automated pieces and the in-depth community reporting its journalists do.

"Not every story needs to be a journalistic article. The hyper-local automated stories have obvious value for the people in those places, and can help fill in news deserts," Rask Jensen said, "but I wouldn't advise you to replace human interaction with automation because it's not a substitute for journalism.

"What we do is make this data available through our newsroom tools, which help reporters work more efficiently and find more stories and, as a consequence, enable them to do even more local journalism and meet even more people in the community."

And that is, of course, a recipe for a strong local news brand: Journalists spending their time out in the community with smart technology back in the newsroom supporting the process and surfacing hyper-local stories in the data.

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About Cecilia Campbell

Cecilia Campbell is chief marketing officer at United Robots in Malmö, Sweden. She can be reached at [email protected] or @CianMian.

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