Understanding the Hyper-Local Hype
Monday, September 14, 2009 at 03:46PM 
‘Hyper-local’ is a buzzword that’s been gaining traction in recent years, but it’s really nothing new. People have always cared about what’s going on around them, and you can look back and find true hyper-local stories in newspaper articles dating from the mid 19th century and earlier. Here are examples from 1909 and 1908.
Hyper-local news has, however, assumed a greater importance lately, and the share of news content devoted to these stories will continue to grow. This shift brings with it a great opportunity for anyone looking to communicate with the public through the media.
The meaning of hyper-local
Hyper-local just means ‘very local’, and it’s used to refer to news stories that concern a very small geographic area. There’s no set definition of how small that area should be, and there’s plenty of overlap between ‘local’, ‘hyper-local’, and ‘micro-local’ – a new term that’s being used to describe “extra-hyper-local” news.
Is the pothole on your street hyper-local news? Yes. What about the local high-school football game? Yes. What about the bank robbery on the other side of town? Well, yes, that’s hyper-local too, but it also has broader relevance.
What matters here isn’t having a strict definition of hyper-local or knowing what’s hyper-local and what’s just local, it’s realizing that these are all just ways that the media claim to be more locally-focused than their competitors. The fact that these terms are everywhere now is just a reflection of the increased importance of local news content.
Why does hyper-local matter more now than in the past?
Well, to the reader, it doesn’t. Hyper-local has always mattered to the reader, but major media have neglected it for a few reasons.
As discussed in this previous post, newspapers were the dominant, monopolistic force in the arena of on-demand news. The spoils of this success however, were translated to their bottom lines rather than reinvested. Management focused on improving efficiency, instead of crafting a better, more comprehensive product.
There was not, and is not, an efficient way to gather hyper-local news. By its very definition, hyper-local matters to only a few people. It’s simply inefficient to send a reporter and a photographer to cover that pothole on the corner. Since they were the go-to source for news in general, newspapers could ignore a lot of the small stuff and still have plenty of unique content to sell ads against.
Things have changed, and now newspapers that have lost their monopoly on national news are trying to solidify their position as the primary local news source. Hyper-local blogs are springing up to try to capture that same market and major news aggregators are trying to find ways to efficiently gather and package hyper-local content. outside.in and EveryBlock are using their own, more creative approaches to build nationwide inventories of hyper-local content.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the inefficiency of gathering hyper-local news content. As before, no one can afford to send a reporter to cover every tiny story, whether it’s the pothole on the corner or little Suzie’s achievement at the science fair.
End game
Who will come out on top in this scramble? It doesn’t matter . . . not to us, anyway. The implication here is that everybody wants hyper-local content, and no one can afford to get enough of it by themselves. That’s why the media in general is adding more features to encourage user generated content; they’re trying to convince their readers to be reporters.
The PR industry is full of professional writers and communicators who are potential sources of hyper-local content. Give the media what they want, hyper-local news content, and they’ll give you the eyes and ears of the public.
