The Hyperlocal Revolution

Apparently, there is a revolution going on (it is not being televised), and Journalista is ready to join in. The hyperlocal revolution is the emergence of community journalism that is hyperlocalized. You have heard of hyperlocal Web sites and have probably even visited them, commented on them and used them to understand your own community in some way. Examples are Yelp or Patch. These are probably the most prominent ones, but others are: MyLATimes, Front Porch Forum and Meet Neighbors.

I found a site that offers tools, advice and resources for people who are ready to join the revolution! It’s hyperlocal 101, and it’s an incredibly useful site for community journalists because it’s current! The last blog post I read was on cell journalism, what it is, how to use it, its benefits and even a link to an article on its ethical uses! I find it particularly interesting because it not only offers advice and tips for journalists, but for entrepreneurial journalists who are creating their own blogs or publications and also would like to make a profit while doing so. For instance, Shields Bialasik, who seems to be a regular contributor to the site, discussed how important he/she has found trade/bartering when it comes to advertising for her/his hyperlocal blog, LocalsGuide. I was surprised that she referred to it as hyperlocal marketing. I am not sure if she created this term or if I am again enlightened to how much catching up I must do in terms of this revolution.

It’s late and Journalista has to drive home in the morning. So, Happy Thanksgiving! Eat well and take time to reflect on what you’re grateful for before returning to the metaphorical fist-pumping of the hyperlocal revolution.

Notes from Journalism History Research:

George Seldes: Absolutely a press visionary, critical genius, and I think at least some of his books should be required reading for journalists. Check out Lords of the Press or Tell the Truth and Run. It gets you riled up in a great way.  No wonder he lived to 105.

Social media is just another way to procrastinate. Thanks, Social Media. Also, Pandora is quite possibly my favorite thing in the whole wide world.

New YouTube features, great for journalists!

I recently found information about YouTube Direct, which allows news organizations to accept and upload user-generated video content right on their sites. Besides being available on the news site, it will also be available on YouTube, which seems like a win-win for both news sites and YouTube, driving more traffic to the sites.

Now that I am learning how great and easy video is, I can definitely see this being useful for even small community papers that may not have the money or technical knowledge to maintain their own video content components to embed on their sites.

Also, YouTube is going to add an automatic caption feature, which is helpful for hearing-impaired audiences. In a recent Graduate Student Association executive board meeting, we discussed using a feature such as this to reach our hearing-impaired peers. The other plus to this feature is that it can also generate translated captions for content which is done in other languages. According to the link I read, there will be 51 languages that can be used in translation of video content. According to the Google blog, with captions, users can jump easily to the portion of the video they want to view. Google, which owns YouTube, will rely on Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) in combination with YouTube’s auto-caps (its automatic caption system). This means that the captions can sometimes be inaccurate. However, overall, captions with a few errors is better than not being able to understand the video at all.

There are not a lot of initial partners for the automatic caption features, but the ones they have are prominent, such as: PBS, Columbia, National Geographic, UC Berkeley, Yale, MIT and Stanford.

Automatic timing is yet another feature for YouTube. It allows users to just type in the transcript of what is being said and YouTube uses ASR and places the captions at the correct times during the video, so that the user does not have to wait.

For a very short tutorial on both auto-caps and auto-timing, click here.