Comments on: DataSphere’s $8 Million Infusion and the Two Camps of Hyperlocal http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2012/03/14/dataspheres-8-million-infusion-and-the-two-camps-of-hyperlocal/ LOCAL MEDIA WATCH. The Nexus of All Things Local Mon, 01 Jun 2015 22:23:47 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.39 By: Emily Lowrey http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2012/03/14/dataspheres-8-million-infusion-and-the-two-camps-of-hyperlocal/comment-page-1/#comment-686863 Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:07:28 +0000 http://blog.kelseygroup.com/?p=20458#comment-686863 The scalability of hyperlocal news operations that believe relationships drive true online community engagement are tied in large part to lack of funding. In the ‘hard work’ camp, you’d be very hard pressed to find a hyperlocal news operation that is either highly leveraged or has taken on debt/equity funding. These are bootstrappers, and many of them came from the journalism track (perhaps working in digital) in traditional media that was highly leveraged. Maybe they learned a lesson or two in that. Many of them certainly know how to scale from working at those operations.

When the right type of funding does become available to hyperlocal bootstrappers, it’s going to be quite interesting to watch what happens because I’m convinced that you can’t be sustainable without the relationships (and the job is quite boring without them too).

Newspapers (& radio, & tv) weren’t just disrupted by a change in consumption (i.e. the internet). It was a cultural interruption tied to the view that maximizing shareholder value alone doesn’t get you to where you need to be anymore, and many still don’t realize this. Maximizing stakeholder (employees, advertisers, audience, community) value is something that the bootstrappers in hyperlocal news operations understand quite well. It’s the funding community that needs to be educated to these changes so they make smart decisions about where to put their cash.

]]>