Dan's Diner: The Local Niche Network Opportunity

Steve Outing's recent E&P column about how to take hyper-local journalism and citizen journalism to the next level, and the criticism and responses to it, got me thinking. I don't exactly agree with what he's saying, but I don't completely disagree with it either.

That's fine, though. The key word there is "I," and I think it demonstrates that he and most traditional media people may be missing the bigger point. Unless you're a celebrity, the world as a whole no longer cares what you individually think. The future of media is all about giving a little bit to everyone, and the future of media business is all about advertising across those interests.

I found one comment of his about typical citizen journalism content particular telling. He wrote, “I can’t begin to describe how dull this collection of content is to me.”

Here's the thing. For everyone who hates one piece of content, someone else loves it. He happens to hate what he reads in YourHub, but he also probably doesn't share much in common with the people who love it.

I can tell you for certain that the regular readers and participants of YourHub, The Northwest Voice and Bakotopia really connect with those brands, and some of them also HATE the daily newspaper. Everyone is an individual.

I've sure learned that lesson lately with my YouTube video Dog Eats Iguana. Many of the 1,100 or so people who've found it are big fans of iguanas, and boy have they told me what they think of that dog (and also me for not saving the iguana). But what about the people who like dogs and hate lizards, or those who know that non-indigenous iguanas are out of control on Puerto Rico? It doesn't bother them one bit.

One of the biggest problems with editorial oversight is that we can use it to fool ourselves into believing that we know what everyone else will be interested in. It’s the lure of the ivory tower. Everyone wants to be at the top and have everyone below agree with everything they say. The truth is that for any editorial decision you make, only a small subset of people will agree with your choices. You can choose to call your view "quality" and theirs "amateur," but I choose to call both niches.

The problem is that it’s very difficult to build a business out of just a few niches. That’s not the fault of “citizen journalism,” but a significant problem that can be solved. I personally choose to focus more on that, rather than trying to "train" regular people to look more like we traditional journalists.

Let me be totally clear about where I stand on this issue of training. We will never succeed in getting normal people to write and report like trained journalists, and we shouldn't try or attempt to pass value judgments on them for not being like us. There may very well be a reason that they're contributing their own stories and online content. Maybe some of them don't like what we're producing, or they think they could do a better job. That's fine, because they now have a voice that until recently they completely lacked. It's a new world.

I think a compelling argument could be made that for the past couple centuries, newspapers have succeeded in convincing everyone that there's one "right" way to share news simply because we were the only ones who could. That's no longer the case, but you couldn't tell by how we act. In reality we're masters at serving one large but shrinking niche interest: people who like traditionally-produced news. The world of media is so much bigger than us now, it's not even funny.

So if the new media world is all about serving many small audiences, where does that leave us? We need to rethink everything. A successful niche strategy requires many, many niches, so we should be trying to figure out how to position ourselves to manage the ultimate local niche network. Let's let thousands of local enthusiasts build their little ivory towers surrounded by a few hundred people and see what happens.

As long as we power the network and can advertise across it -- which I find more interesting and possibly easier than trying to break down one newspaper audience into multiple interests -- who cares about what I, or you, or Steve Outing thinks about the quality of the content? If it appeals to the people who are part of each niche, that's what's important. (And that's what advertisers will care most about too, by the way).

Don’t think this is possible? Check out Ning.com, the social-networking-creator tool championed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. It powers 230,000 networks and is growing at 1,000 new networks each day, and is now valued at 1/2 billion dollars. This shows that it's possible to make this happen, but it requires completely different assumptions and thought processes.

In my view, local media organizations' biggest challenge is how to do what Ning has done at a local level, and also leverage the unique knowledge and assets we have for “terrestrial” distribution of content (in other words, print). Our challenge is all about either embracing fragmentation, or being consumed by it.