The layoffs at Patch have been met around the industry as the latest sign that hyperlocal can’t work because of the difficulties in scaling content and ad sales locally while attracting a reasonable quorum of local readers. Hale Global, the new owners at Patch, don’t believe it. And neither do the hundreds of people who make up an extended hyperlocal community, including a number of ex-Patchers who remain at least personally committed to making hyperlocal work.

Chris Jennewein has been pushing the envelope in hyperlocal since the early days of Videotex at The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Since then, we’ve followed him as he lead a series of major initiatives at Knight Ridder Digital, The San Diego Union Tribune, The San Diego News Network, The Las Vegas Sun and most recently, as Southern California’s editorial leader for Patch.

Today, Jennewein launched The Times of San Diego. Is he The Man of LaMancha, chasing the Impossible Dream? I asked him a few questions via email.

Q: People think hyperlocal will never work. What did you learn about what does work?

The challenge with hyperlocal is to match the market size with the economic opportunity. Bigger markets simply have more opportunity. We think the San Diego metropolitan area, with a population of 3.2 million, is a sufficiently large opportunity and yet still local. In fact, in today’s world regional is probably local because people commute long distances and their personal and professional networks stretch far beyond individual communities.

Q: What have you learned about San Diego as a media market in terms of hyperlocal? Pros and cons?

San Diego may be farther along in regionalization that some older markets in America. San Diegans think they live in the entire metro area, not just La Jolla or Chula Vista or Carlsbad. So a regional news source is more likely to succeed here.

Q: Is this a model you can take to other markets?

I think this is a model that would definitely work in other markets, especially in the West, but our focus is solely San Diego right now.

Q: Do you think you are directly competing with other media properties at this point? Which ones?

We’re not competing with other media but instead going after what we call “unaffiliated local news consumers.” These are people who get news from a wide variety of sources on an almost serendipitous basis. Our goal is to provide this audience with essential local news and information in an easy-to-consume manner.

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The layoffs at Patch have been met around the industry as the latest sign that hyperlocal can’t work because of the difficulties in scaling content and ad sales locally while attracting a reasonable quorum of local readers. Hale Global, the new owners at Patch, don’t believe it. And neither do the hundreds of people who make up an extended hyperlocal community, including a number of ex-Patchers who remain at least personally committed to making hyperlocal work.

Chris Jennewein has been pushing the envelope in hyperlocal since the early days of Videotex at The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Since then, we’ve followed him as he lead a series of major initiatives at Knight Ridder Digital, The San Diego Union Tribune, The San Diego News Network, The Las Vegas Sun and most recently, as Southern California’s editorial leader for Patch.

Today, Jennewein launched The Times of San Diego. Is he The Man of LaMancha, chasing the Impossible Dream? I asked him a few questions via email.

Q: People think hyperlocal will never work. What did you learn about what does work?

The challenge with hyperlocal is to match the market size with the economic opportunity. Bigger markets simply have more opportunity. We think the San Diego metropolitan area, with a population of 3.2 million, is a sufficiently large opportunity and yet still local. In fact, in today’s world regional is probably local because people commute long distances and their personal and professional networks stretch far beyond individual communities.

Q: What have you learned about San Diego as a media market in terms of hyperlocal? Pros and cons?

San Diego may be farther along in regionalization that some older markets in America. San Diegans think they live in the entire metro area, not just La Jolla or Chula Vista or Carlsbad. So a regional news source is more likely to succeed here.

Q: Is this a model you can take to other markets?

I think this is a model that would definitely work in other markets, especially in the West, but our focus is solely San Diego right now.

Q: Do you think you are directly competing with other media properties at this point? Which ones?

We’re not competing with other media but instead going after what we call “unaffiliated local news consumers.” These are people who get news from a wide variety of sources on an almost serendipitous basis. Our goal is to provide this audience with essential local news and information in an easy-to-consume manner.

The post Hyperlocal Lives! Chris Jennewein and The New 'Times of San Diego' appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Ease of transaction, rewards and “exclusives” will be key to the next generation of deals, and the credit card companies are determined to play a major role. MasterCard is working with NextJump for a special rewards programs, and has a number of other initiatives in the space (which key execs will discuss at our Deals 3D conference next month). CitiGroup branded MasterCard, similarly, is partnering with Google to offer deals over mobile phones. Groupon is also said to be working on a credit card arrangement.

Now, American Express is revving up “Serve,” its erstwhile PayPal killer. Serve is an online and mobile commerce platform that enables consumers to preload cash on the card and eliminates the need to print out coupons, among other things. A key part of the platform will be local deals, which will be promoted on AOL’s Patch.com, which expects to have more than 1,000 hyperlocal sites by the end of the year. Customers will need a special credit card to participate.

The arrangement kicks in this fall, launching in Eugene, Oregon. Full personalization based on individual customer data will be fully developed in six to 12 months, according to AmEx (via Chicago Business).

It isn’t clear whether Patch will also be sourcing deals. Patch had previously announced a new initiative it calls “Patch eSaver,” which will show all the deals available in town every Tuesday.

The post AmEx’s Serve and AOL’s Patch.com Partner for Prepaid, Paperless Deals appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

I take great delight in the Carlsbad Patch updates on my smartphone every morning. And the Fwix local app on my iPad. But why do I feel they are my “guilty pleasures”? Because there is a rap out there that hyperlocal doesn’t scale and these are toys.

Is it still the case?

Patch now has a local presence in 600 communities, with editorial and sales “pods” of 12 each. Some are being run by longtime newspaper industry leaders (such as former SignOn San Diego leader Chris Jennewein and ex-NAA New Media Federation staffer Beth Lawton).

Last Sunday, LA Times media columnist James Rainey wrote that Patch is revitalizing local journalism and asserted that may have become THE place for journalists to go (aside from wages of $35k-$50k, or half the salary that big city journalists might have gotten from the big metro, if they were hiring).

That’s fine by Patch President Warren Webster. At ILM:10, Webster didn’t dispute my characterization of Patch as an experiment that wants to quickly get a national footprint to attract national, regional and local advertisers; create a business directory that goes beyond the Yellow Pages; and scale editorial and sales resources.

On a macro level, local ad revenues typically split 50/50 between targeted national and local. For Webster (and cohorts Jon Brod of AOL Ventures, and AOL Chief Tim Armstrong), the bet is that Patch is poised to do both. They’ve publicly said they were spending $50 million to ramp it up in 2010.

Sites such as Main Street Connect and Hello Metro are going down much the same path — although they likely aren’t as focused on winning national dollars as yet. Main Street Connect in the NY metro area has raised $4 million for its effort, and recently signed up Carl Lavin from The Philadelphia Inquirer (and more recently, Forbes) to run its own editorial pods. Many single city efforts have also launched, such as Allbritton’s TBD.com in the Washington metro area.

Sales aren’t guaranteed for any of these. It remains tough to get through to SMBs — note the partial retreat of The New York Times, which offloaded The Local, its hyperlocal effort.

But for the sites that green-light hyperlocal, the hypothesis is they’ll get to local advertisers with local sales forces, and advertisers will follow an audience — especially the affluent, suburban audience targeted in many of these sites. Which brings us to the biggest question for 2011. It isn’t about sales quotas. That’s premature. It’s the audience question.

The audience question is a big “if.” Some of the sites hope to differentiate themselves with audiences via higher quality, more targeted local content or better mapping. But they face super-fragmentation, with at least five or six sources of “good enough” local info, as well as possibly declining user interest in local news in an age of urban sprawl. It is an issue made even more complex by aggregators, where they all feature each other’s content.

Sites that are focused more on geographic aggregation for media partners, such as Topix, Outside.in. Fwix, DataSphere and Everyblock. Local event and news site such as AmericanTowns.com, Center’d and DiscoverOurTown are also part of the mix.

Some of the aggregators are also supported by unique user-generated content and pro/amateur content farms, such as Examiner.com, Associated Content, Demand Media, Helium, MerchantCircle Studios and others.

Examiner.com, by itself, may actually have many times the traffic of a Patch, as CEO Rick Blair notes. Yahoo’s $100 million acquisition of Associated Content this year may have similar implications.

So as we end 2010, and think about 2011, do we think that hyperlocal is going to begin to cut it? One assumes there will inevitably be a shakeout and shutdowns in the coming year. And there will also be smarter ways to economize via user-generated content and aggregation. The all-purpose use of the “hyperlocal” term will also fall by the wayside.

But if more of us find our guilty pleasures from checking out the hyperlocal news on our smartphones and our iPads, and sneaking peeks on our PCs during the day — there is simply no reason to think it will generally fail.

The post Hyperlocal in 2011: A Break in the Clouds? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In a discussion with paidContent, Patch President Warren Webster discussed Patch’s check list of 59 variables that the site uses to determine which new towns it enters, including a first cut that consists of town population between 15,000 and 75,000; having better than average school scores; and better than average household incomes and voting penetration. A second cut includes qualitative characteristics such as civic “walkability” and the presence of an active business community.

While the site hasn’t focused on revenues to date, Webster told paidContent that it has had some experimental advertising, including banners ads and business listings that can be upgraded into advertising. It also has had some geotargeted national advertising for campaigns such as Pepsi Refresh. The site also plans to syndicate the data it is collecting on local communities to marketers.

There has, of course, been a blind assumption that if AOL is investing, then hyperlocal is finally ready for prime time. It is too early to come to that conclusion — witness The New York Times’ pullback a few weeks back from The Local, its aborted hyperlocal effort.

But AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s consistent and vocal support for Patch, which he founded in 2007 as a side project when he was at Google, is definitely seen as validation for multimillion-dollar investments by others. These include other news-centric town site nets such as Main Street Connect; content creator sites such as Examiner.com; and city sites that break out neighborhood info via ZIP codes such as Allbritton’s TBD.com in Washington, D.C., Citysquares and various newspaper efforts.

Hyperlocal commerce sites such as MerchantCircle, DataSphere, Matchbin and ShopCity should also be seen as part of the mix. So should sites that have hired human writers to supplement local news feeds, such as HelloMetro and Yahoo Local. Event sites such as Zvents and Eventful are also part of the mix, as are sites that have a lot of events and local in them, such as Center’d and AmericanTowns.

City guides that are more metro-oriented, such as Citysearch and Yelp, should also be part of the mix, as should social directory sites such as YP.com, Local.com and MojoPages.

So, what’s the prognosis? We certainly like what we see at Patch. The town sites are attractive; they invite interaction and have a good “human” feel — some more than others, often based on how long the town site has been open. The longer, the better.

The aggregation of events is good and so is their mapping. There is also some intriguing video that draws people in. I especially enjoyed the contentious town meeting in my hometown of Chappaqua, N.Y. A lot of the infrastructure is more economically produced by central resources.

But in truth, Patch’s success or failure won’t ride so much on content and feature differentiation. Fifty million dollars is a lot of money. But it represents the scope of the project, not the individual sites. You wouldn’t go to a Patch community such as Westport, Connecticut, and say it stands head and shoulders above other local alternatives, such as Hearst’s Westport News, Main Street Connect’s The Daily Westport or Westport Now. Patch’s young and enthusiastic reporters are sometimes better (or not better) than their young and enthusiastic reporters.

What Patch’s ultimate success really rides on is changing local user behavior so that people feel compelled to check out the local patch at least a couple of times a week. It has to be a bigger swath than the older home owners who make up the primary audience of community weeklies — it’s got to be everybody. And then they’ve got to sell SMBs from the directory level on up — much of the effort probably riding on self-serve. And then they’ve got to get the geotargeted national advertising going.

Patch hopes to get over the hump by having enough of a footprint in its communities to begin marketing in a major way, perhaps, I speculate, on TV and radio and online. For sure, it is an exciting effort, and no one should dismiss it out of hand. In fact, AOL is spending the money and making the effort that could, in theory, save local journalism and hyperlocal commerce for everyone.

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