AOL and Hyper-Local—Good Luck With That

CEO Tim Armstrong believes he can succeed in hyper-local journalism, where even experienced journalists have failed

By Mathew Ingram

The newly renamed AOL is planning an ambitious expansion of its hyper-local Patch.com venture, the one it bought from a group of investors—including AOL CEO Tim Armstrong—last year, according to a report by Business Insider. But can AOL find success in hyper-local journalism when so many have failed?

The report quotes an internal company memo that describes AOL's plans to expand Patch to "hundreds" of local news sites by the end of this year, from some 30 today, with the goal of being "leaders in one of the most promising 'white spaces' on the Internet" (a phrase that got under the skin of former journalist and new media consultant Ken Doctor). Patch has already expanded considerably since it was acquired in June of last year, when it had operations in just five towns and cities in New Jersey and Connecticut.

For at least a decade now, local journalism on the Web has been viewed as a kind of can't-miss, slam-dunk success just waiting to happen. And yet, it has stubbornly missed and generally failed to happen on any number of occasions, including via the efforts of numerous startups backed by actual journalists—such as Mark Potts, a former Washington Post scribe who co-founded Backfence.com in 2005 (it closed in 2007), and digital journalism veteran Dan Gillmor, who started and then later closed a site called Bayosphere. (You could argue that CitySearch and Microsoft's Sidewalk were similar failed experiments back in the late 1990s.)

Some Successes So Far

That's not to say there aren't hyper-local journalism efforts that are working—Howard Owens, for example, a former executive with the regional newspaper chain Gatehouse Media, seems to be doing well with The Batavian in upstate New York, and journalism professor Leonard Witt has been expanding his "representative journalism" model, which I wrote about at the Nieman Journalism Lab. There's also a new startup called Oakland Local, founded by former AOL Vice-President Susan Mernit, that seems to be growing rapidly, and some other interesting experiments are going on as well, including Outside.in, Placeblogger, and Everyblock, which was acquired by MSNBC.

But the field is littered with the bodies of those who tried and failed, including the Washington Post's Loudoun Extra project. Why did Backfence and other local news startups fail? Any number of reasons, in most cases—a failure to find enough local advertising, lack of sufficient marketing, a dearth of compelling content.In a post after Backfence died, Mark Potts did a great job of listing some important factors in doing local news well, including the need to engage with and listen to the community, and the fact that "[I]t's not news, it's a conversation."

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