The Buie Knife

In Mass Culture, Why Does Junk Crowd Out Quality?

Down a barren highway toward the Cappadocia region of Turkey, one comes across a lone billboard. See slide show of billboards by American corporations in Turkey.

"Mass culture is responsible for debasing our moral values," some 70 percent of Americans have consistently told pollsters. Not only that, but mass culture is the chief American export, so one could argue that American culture is debasing the world's cultures. 

People the world over tend to agree. But they still buy fast food which makes them fat, spend too much time computer gaming which make them fatter, and sit like couch potatoes for hours watching trash television entertainment rather than quality programming, which makes them even fatter and dumber.  

What is to blame for this sorry state of world affairs aside from consumers choosing the path of least resistance and the lowest common denominator? 

The Vilification of Walter Cronkite and Hawks' Vietnam Revisionism

The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl wrote in 1949, in a book on Napoleon, that "history is an argument without end." Proving the point, Greensboro blogger Joe Guarino suggests that the recently departed Walter Cronkite and CBS News led biased media coverage of the war in Vietnam, unjustifiably "turn(ing) the American people against...the American effort in Vietnam." He goes on to assert that national media should not be free to "undermine the war effort." Other posters on Joe's blog chime in on the failures of Cronkite and his team to be cheerleaders for U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and for "paving the way" for liberal opinion to dominate the media today.

It's not just local bloggers who are making these far-fetched points. In a bout of revisionist fantasy after Robert McNamara's death, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that Vietnam was "the liberals' war" but was salvaged to "a draw" by conservatives after liberals "lost their resolve." The WSJ's James Taranto followed up with a blog post on "The Cronkite Tragedy: How a Great Newsman Helped Undermine His Profession's Ethos." Matt Paterson, a National Review Washington Fellow, writes that Cronkite "has blood on his hands" because Vietnam doves like him were responsible for the bloodbath that occurred in the region after the U.S. withdrew. And Cliff Kincaid of AIM.org ("Accuracy in Media," from a conservative perspective) has published "The Terrible Truth About Walter Cronkite," resurrecting old charges that the "most trusted man in America" misreported Vietnam so badly that he "create(d) the conditions for a premature U.S. military withdrawal, leading to the loss of the lives of 58,000 Americans in vain, not to mention the millions of additional deaths caused in Vietnam and Cambodia by the Communists."

I could not disagree more strongly. With the benefit of hindsight and perspective, we can see that these arguments simply lack merit. The notion that the long war in Vietnam would have turned into an American success story were it not for the "loss of resolve" of American liberals, the liberal media, and consequently, the American people, is preposterous, as I documented in my responses on Joe's blog and in an earlier post here on "The Fog of War." And it's a bit shocking that Joe opposes the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press, apparently supporting government control of media coverage of war. (When I challenged him on this, he stated that all media should "voluntarily" support government war policies. If media isn't cooperative, he suggests independent journalistic reports from war zones should be jettisoned or eliminated.) 

Joe approvingly quotes an article from 1978 by Air Force Captain Don Bishop claiming that "the politicians, press, and peace advocates stabbed us in the back in Vietnam." Ed Cone points out the phrase "stabbed in the back" was used by Hitler and other German reactionaries after World War I in an effort to stir up a popular backlash against the German establishment who "betrayed" the German people by losing World War I. The right-wingers have forgotten that Cronkite was given a prestigious award by West Point for his war coverage. His speech is here.

Like their German counterparts, American reactionaries today hope they can stir up a backlash and a sense of "betrayal" and a feeling of being "stabbed in the back" by the American media and political establishment, which they say portrayed the Iraq war effort as a failure from early on, and turned the American people against it. According to this paranoid, conspiratorial analysis, the media establishment promoted an inexperienced, unqualified African American socialist to the White House (who would not have won without their support), told the American people that the government had no choice but to intervene in the free market, bail out banks, Wall Street financiers and auto companies, impose national health care on the people, create a huge deficit, raise taxes and bankrupt the nation.

People who make these reactionary arguments never learned the lessons of Vietnam, apparently never read seminal books like David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest or Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake, and apparently do not accept the rights of the American press as enunciated in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1971 Pentagon Papers case.

They subscribe to a conspiratorial view of the media and the "eastern liberal establishment," ignoring the fact that the media establishment was an early cheerleader for both the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. 

On economic policy, they are essentially free market fundamentalists who don't realize or accept that their retrograde philosophy lost for good in the 1932 election and has been repudiated by many Republican presidents -- Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush -- and Republican presidential candidates, most recently John McCain.

I cannot imagine that these reactionary ideas are going to bring the American conservative movement back into political dominance. It's sad to see their vilification of Cronkite -- evidence of just how out of touch they are.

Yet they have more clout today than they did in Cronkite's time. One of the ironies of history is that instead of being hailed as a journalistic hero at his retirement in 1981 and then again at his death, if Cronkite had somehow managed to hang on to the anchorman's slot for another couple of decades, he no doubt would have been demonized by the right, and attacked by bloggers. Faced with declining ratings and lowered credibility, he probably would have been booted out of CBS News like his successor Dan Rather was. The power of the "mainstream media" ain't what it used to be.

Sarah Palin Still Represents Hundreds of Thousands of People

Sarah Palin remains overwhelmingly popular among Republicans. Some 72 percent of GOP members and GOP-leaning independents view her favorably, more than any other potential presidential candidate. Twitter is helping get her message out, with nearly 100,000 followers as of this writing. And she still has nearly 664,400 Facebook fans, though presumably many of those signed up during the 2008 fall campaign and cannot be taken for granted as future supporters. Even so, she gained 70,000 supporters on Facebook in 10 days, from July 6 to July 16th. An unofficial blog, Conservatives4Palin.com, seeks to harness the energy of supporters.

She has far more supporters online than any other potential Republican presidential candidate such as former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, current Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, or Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Her supporters will probably help her raise millions of dollars online.

She sees herself much like a "mama bear," according to her Twitter feed. But she's also putting her virtual foot in her mouth on Twitter. In a late-night tweet, Palin took Walter Cronkite's quote about the necessity of journalists to be "liberal" completely out of context. The Cronkite quote is actually an inspirational one about keeping free of political dogma, remaining "nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause - but examining each case on its merits."

Scanning the comments on Palin's Facebook fan page, I see many libertarian and religious right comments, people who believe that "common sense" is far more important than "elite education," people upset with health care reform, cap-and-trade, income taxes, illegal immigration, the "liberal media" and the Republican establishment (called RINOs -- Republicans in Name Only).  In short, Palin could easily find herself leading an anti-establishment, populist movement within the GOP not unlike previous "movements" led by Pat Buchanan in 1992, Barry Goldwater in 1964, or more successfully, Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980.

Though she's no longer governor of Alaska, Palin is not retiring from politics. There's every indication she's still planning to advocate for causes. She authored an op-ed in The Washington Post on the cap-and-trade energy plan, which she calls "cap and tax." Adversaries respond that she doesn't really understand the issue.

Those who presume that Palin is just "not smart," however, are probably underestimating her. She held her own in the debate with Joe Biden, and she's perfectly capable of winning a debate, especially if expectations for her are low.

Not a fan of Palin, Andrew Sullivan says: "Bring her on. She is the id of the current Republican party: pure identity politics, no serious ideas for reform, and utterly unserious as a party of government. She would be the ideal representative of the current GOP on television."

Polls suggest she is viewed unfavorably by a plurality of Americans, 45%, while 41% view her favorably. This could change, however, if she picks the right issues to emphasize.

Meanwhile, Thomas Franks in the WSJ observes that Palin has become a martyr to some segments of conservatism.

How Reporter Bob Woodward, Now Working on Book About Obama White House, Gets Reluctant Sources to Talk

So Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward is working on a book that's to be a behind-the-scenes look at the Obama White House. (See Gabriel Sherman's piece in The New Republic, "Plan of Attack: Bob Woodward Vs the White House." ) Woodward's ability to get high-level people to talk on the record and to reveal embarrassing details about government decision-making is legendary. Sherman quotes George Stephanopoulos' 1999 memoir, All Too Human to explain Woodward's reporting style:

"He flashes a glimpse of what he knows, shaded in a largely negative light, with the hint of more to come, setting up a series of prisoner's dilemmas in which each prospective source faces a choice: Do you cooperate and elaborate in return (you hope) for learning more and earning a better portrayal--for your boss and yourself? Or do you call his bluff by walking away in the hope that your reticence will make the final product less authoritative and therefore less damaging? If no one talks, there is no book. But someone--then everyone--always talks."

Drill Deeper:

• "Plan of Attack: Bob Woodward Vs the White House."
• Bob Woodward Wikipedia entry.
• 10 Things Obama Should Learn from Bush, by Bob Woodward

Despite Sensational Sound Bites, Awkward TV Interviews & TMI, Elizabeth Edwards Moves Crowd at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. She Writes Well, Offers Deep, Helpful, Inspiring Book

Elizabeth Edwards at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh (Video from WRAL).

As someone who met and was charmed by Elizabeth Edwards on several occasions, as I detailed in this blog post, I've been uncomfortable with the "too much information" in news articles and television interviews accompanying the release of her new book, "Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities." I have tended to agree with the critical remarks expressed in "Why, Mrs. Edwards?" at the Progressive Pulse Blog and even the dependably catty columnist Maureen Dowd in the NYTimes. The gossipy chatter with "the girls" about the "love child" on "The View" was the worst spectacle of all.

But presumably the TMI interviews are ephemeral. "All notoriety is fleeting," she said in a brief interview with The News and Observer. It is secondary and less enduring than the quality of the book, which the LA Times describes as a fine effort, with a lot of depth, an important contribution and source of support for people who've been through similar things. A reading she gave at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh was far more revelatory and truly spiritual than the sensational television interviews and sound bites.

While Dowd and others have characterized her media tour as a vengeful airing of dirty laundry in order to get back at her husband, that doesn't seem to be the case. She signed a contract to write the book long before John's "indiscretion," she says. The theme of the book is finding the strength to survive life's great disappointments and blows. If the book were released a few years from now, or after her death, some of her remarks in interviews would simply seem human, not sensational. But she does not have the luxury of time. The salacious material is a very small part of the manuscript.

Edwards’ book "is a treasure for women who are trying to sort out the pain of a husband’s affair," writes Betty Hooker in the comments section of a New York Times article. "There aren’t many books that share someone’s real experience. Elizabeth’s book will help a lot of people feel less alone. Less crazy. Less to blame. Of course it is wrong for anyone to cheat on their spouse. But in my experience the real character of the man is revealed in how much effort he is willing to put into repairing the damage he has done. If someone is willing to do the work, I do not see how others can criticize the wife for choosing to stay in the marriage. I believe children are damaged when they learn the lesson that problems and pains must be kept quiet so everything “looks good” to the neighbors. It is much healthier to learn that everyone struggles and it is OK to talk about it. I admire Elizabeth Edwards."

One of the better (and tougher) interviews Elizabeth agreed to was with Matt Lauer of NBC's Today Show. After asking hard questions of Edwards that are on the minds of many people, Lauer read the last paragraph of her book aloud: “I have said before that I do not know what the most important lesson is that I will ever teach my children, Cate and Emma Claire and Jack. I do know that when they are older and telling their own children about their grandmother, they will be able to say that she stood in the storm, and when the wind did not go her way — and surely it has not — she adjusted her sails.” He asked her if that’s still the message she hopes people come away with. “It is,” she said. “I hope that it is when bad things happen, you have the strength to face them.”

That model of resilience in the face of perceived public humiliation and lurking death is probably what Elizabeth Edwards is trying to communicate. She hasn't been humiliated -- she has stayed strong -- and the prospect of early death has not defeated her.

Related:

• My earlier impressions of Elizabeth Edwards
• Elizabeth Edwards reads her new book in Raleigh (N&O)
• Excerpt from awkward Edwards' interview on Oprah
• John Edwards Deserves Mockery, Ridicule

In Praise of A Vanishing Breed: Copy Editors

Listening to a repeat of a story from the public radio show, "On the Media" about under-appreciated copy editors, I appreciate how lucky I was to have THREE copy editors for my book, Teacher of Our Town. One of them scrutinized the manuscript for content, organization and factual errors, making positive suggestions for improvement, and two scrutinized the manuscript primarily for spelling and grammar errors, but also for factual errors.

Every writer needs good editors. Just as every lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, every writer who tries to be his own editor has a fool for an editor.

The sad news at newspapers, magazines and book publishers is that copy editors are a vanishing breed. This is a long-term trend, going back to the 1980s, and accelerated in this recession, even at such industry leaders as The Washington Post. Copy editors have been laid off in droves, with publishers hoping the public won't notice. But the public does notice that newspapers, magazines and books these days have MORE ERRORS. 

A major drawback of blogs and the fast pace of online publishing is that no time is built in for copy editing or for rewriting. If newspapers with their daily deadlines have historically been the "first draft of history," online journalism with a deadline every minute is "the first draft of newspapers."In other words, it's often half-baked.

Newspapers' standard-setters, fact-checkers, and nitpickers who used to demand quality control are a dying breed. As a consequence, language and discourse have been impoverished. In "real-time" interactive media, writers are increasingly dependent on READERS to spot errors that can be easily corrected quickly online.

Newspapers Drive Traffic to Websites. Loyal Readers Ought to be Willing to Pay SOMETHING Each Month

It's NOT newspapers vs. the Internet. Truth is that newspaper websites drive traffic to their online counterparts. Traffic to web-only newspaper sites is still very low, Editor & Publisher reports, offering a rundown of traffic to major newspaper websites. "Overall, three-quarters of the top 30 online newspapers experienced double-digit growth in March year-over-year." Interestingly, The News and Observer's web traffic in March, 2009 was 1,665,000 unique visitors, up 106% compared to March, 2008. (Part of this may be due to UNC winning the NCAA championship, but it's still impressive, especially since it has been reported that the N&O's website was running a poor second to WRAL.com.)

Given the dramatic increase in online traffic, I'd say newspapers have got to persuade readers to PAY SOMETHING for what they read. If I read five articles or more from a single site on a daily basis, I ought to be willing to pay $5 a month or $60 a year. That's a basic value proposition that we all ought to be willing to accept. I'd try gentle persuasion first (like public radio does), before erecting pay walls.

Related: A discussion with the publisher of the Raleigh Telegram on the future of the News and Observer.

Using Internet, Boston Globe's Guild Asks Public to Help Save Newspaper from Shutdown

The Boston Globe may be shut down by the end of April by its parent, The New York Times, which is demanding $20 million in cuts. A journalist at The Globe forwarded to me this letter (below) from Dan Totten, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild, launching a public campaign to save the newspaper from shutdown, complete with an online petition and a mass rally Friday at Faneuil Hall in Boston. Many readers say they would pay to read the Globe online. With 5.7 million unique visitors in February, 2009 alone, it would only take an average of $5 from each of them to save the paper.

Using the power of their mass audience to solicit voluntary reader contributions might be one way to save newspapers that have a large base of truly loyal readers.In my view, it's far better to do that than to do what McClatchy is doing, slashing staff until brands like The News and Observer and The Charlotte Observer are worthless.

Heck, even I, a cheapskate and a very occasional reader of The Globe who lives hundreds of miles from New England, would pitch in $5 or more to save The Globe if I could do so with an online contribution, and if I could be sure the contribution was going to pay for the good journalism the Globe does rather than to pay for the luxuries of those in the executive suites who've enriched themselves, who out of hubris made the bad decisions to take on huge corporate debt through mergers. Globe management was short-sighted in anticipating the impact of the Internet, refusing, for example, to invest in start-ups like Monster.com in the mid-1990s when they could have.

I got far more than $5 in value from reading the fascinating, thorough, fair and balanced series on Ted Kennedy, which has been turned into two excellent books, "Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy" and "Ted Kennedy: Scenes from an Epic Life."

What You Can Do

Sign the Newspaper Guild's Petition to Save the Globe

Raleigh's News and Observer: Sinking Ship?

(Click to enlarge.) The News and Observer says goodbye to 31 very talented staffers. They may have the last word with this mock front page equating the paper's corporate owner, McClatchy, to the Titanic.  Though the Triangle continues to grow, the paper now has about half the newsroom staff it did when McClatchy bought it in 1995 -- 150 now compared to 250 then.

It's very sad to see so many talented journalists losing a large local audience for their fine work. Out of the ashes of the current downturn -- a depression for the newspaper business -- let us hope that new models for great journalism can be created.

More layoffs may be coming in June. McClatchy, owner of both the Raleigh and Charlotte papers, is simply trying to survive under crippling debt. It has cut its overall staff by a third in just one year. There have been four rounds of cuts at The Charlotte Observer.

But in truth, the N&O probably isn't part a sinking ship. McClatchy could probably completely merge the two newspapers and their websites, lay off another 100  employees, and turn their daily newspapers into profitable shoppers with half the news now carried. Together, the two papers still have a combined Sunday circulation of nearly 450,000 -- the highest penetration of any print publication in North Carolina. Even with dramatic subscription cancellations -- say, 10 percent a year -- it will probably be a decade before it no longer makes sense to publish a statewide Sunday paper.

Most newspapers are already losing five to seven percent a year to the Internet. McClatchy is desperately focused on short term ad revenue to service its huge debt in order to avoid bankruptcy. If McClatchy survives this recession (depression) this year and advertising revenues come back at least  partly in 2010, it will have survived the worst. It may eventually resort to giving the paper away for free in order to claim high circulation / penetration into Triangle-area homes to impress advertisers.

• The N&O and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
• Bon Voyage, News and Observer Staffers
• Frank Daniels Jr. Says McClatchy's Howard Weaver Is Mistaken on N&O

Previous:

• Testing New Business Models for Hyperlocal Journalism
• Facebook As A Source for News, Filling in the Gap of Declining Newspapers
• Future of Newspapers: Local, Local, Local Weeklies and Monthlies, More Advocacy Journalism
• NC Indyweek.com: Cover Story on the Future of NC Journalism

Testing New Business Models for Hyperlocal Journalism

The collapse of the daily newspaper industry may ultimately have a revitalizing effect on media. The big metro dailies that are in such financial trouble today may be like the old mass-produced beers such as Schlitz, "the beer that made Milwaukee famous" that ran into financial trouble in the 1970s and is now produced in very small quantities. "Look at what microbreweries have done for beer," Dan Gillmor noted in a talk I attended at UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication (JOMC).

Indeed, sampling blogs and small online journalistic enterprises at bag lunches and meetups may become a widespread hobby like sampling beers at microbreweries. The obstacle so far, of course, is that this "new journalism" hasn't found a way to sustain itself financially. The beer is essentially given away for FREE.

Alan Murray, a UNC grad who now heads up the Wall Street Journal's online media efforts, also spoke recently at the JOMC. Professor Ryan Thornburg "tweeted" Murray's talk:

The newspaper biz never more "exciting", "vibrant", "filled with possibilities"...WSJ free audience from 8M to 20M uniques per month. Pay subscribers grow from 900K to 1.1M....Public won't be poorly served if number of DC reporters drops by 75%. As long as the remaining 25 don't do pack journalism..."I look at the Drudge Web site every day." ... "He's just a very good editor." EXACTLY!..."Every journalist today is in effect marketing his own copy."...“do what you do best, and link to the rest” ...Does #WSJ biz model work for local public affairs news? http://is.gd/qvik

Five tips on charging for content, from Alan Murray.

Dan Conover contends in "2020 Vision: What's Next for News" that the sooner that slowly dying debt-ridden metro dailies disappear, the sooner new business models will emerge. National newspapers may rebound by 2010, local papers with circulations of 30,000 or less will continue to be profitable, but "the hybrid beast known as the metro daily is in trouble, and most will not survive past 2010 in their traditional configurations," he writes. These metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which innovation must occur, he writes. They are limiting serious competition in their markets. "What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants." (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

'Hyperlocal' blogs and websites such as EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch are startups trying to find business models. They are looking to persuade small businesses that serve neighborhoods to advertise online rather than (or in addition to) the Yellow Pages. My friend Peter Krasilovsky, an analyst with the Kelsey Group who blogs at LocalOnliner.com, estimates this online ad market to be $32 billion by 2013. "Hyperlocal Websites Deliver News Without Newspapers," an article in The New York Times, explains. There's a good discussion over at Edcone's blog here and here about  the NYT article, with the publisher of the Raleigh Telegram offering his sober experience.

"Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web," the Times reports. As someone who launched a "hyperlocal" Internet publication for Takoma Park, MD back in the 1990s, by necessity more as an avocation than a vocation, I know a bit about this.

I started in 1997 not with a business motivation but to mobilize neighbors electronically to address rising crime in the neighborhood. Eventually my email listserv reached more than 50 percent of the homes in my subdivision. More than 20 other email listservs in the town of 20,000 cropped up as a way for members of subdivisions to communicate. The challenge was that neighbors on these lists rarely communicated with each other, so I created one list to aggregate news and discussions for the entire town.  

I had to have the flexibility to realize that one thing I learned in journalism school could not apply to this bootstrapped venture -- there could be no wall of separation between advertising sales and writers/editors. I sold ads to local advertisers and produced journalistic content. My modest efforts reached at most a few thousand people and brought in a few thousand dollars per year. I continued publication until I moved from the area in 2005.

Early in the venture, I tried to interest The Washington Post in hyperlocal online publications, but instead they invested in top-down rather than bottom-up online publications that failed. 

The metric I developed was that 2000 unique locally-based website visitors/users were worth about $2 each to collective local advertiser revenue. So even with 10,000 uniques, you couldn't generate more than $20K in ad revenue. Perhaps in neighborhoods with denser population, more commercial development and a far more aggressive ad sales rep than I was you could do better.

Another metric I developed was that a locally-based email list of say, 2000, with ads integrated tastefully into a regular email newsletter and website, would over the course of a year or so, generate 20 customers for a local business. To a real estate agent, a car dealer, or other businesses selling high-end products or services, a real prospect is worth hundreds of dollars and a sale or referral from the site is worth thousands of dollars of advertising.

So the challenge for locally-based online businesses is identifying and delivering real prospects to your advertisers.

When online can do that, local advertisers will value it more than they do print ads. Publishers still have to PROVE the value of online ads to local advertisers. I'm interested to see if online social networking will offer profitable returns for advertisers without being so obnoxious site users are driven away. That MIGHT provide a new revenue stream for online publishers.

Initially, giving one real estate agent exclusive rights to advertise on the hyperlocal site was of more value to him than if I let 10 real estate advertisers do so.

Based on my experience, I believe successful hyperlocal online publications, will have to: 

• have a web-to-print mentality rather than a print-to-web mentality.
• work in alliance or in conjunction with local monthly or weekly print publications that already have an ad sales force, or with the expectation that a monthly or weekly print publication will eventually be produced as interest and demand increases.
• Some, perhaps many readers and advertisers, still want to see a print publication. The online habits of over-35 readers are not yet such that they will seek out online publications.
• work in alliance or conjunction with neighborhood-based email listservs or web-based neighborhood lists. Email listservs inevitably have more readership and participation than web-based services, but the problem may be that they produce too much email unless in "digest" mode.
• Local media fragmentation is a problem. Many locales have several publications, online and off, that cover them haphazardly and inconsistently, while no one covers them CONSISTENTLY, THOROUGHLY and WELL. Any successful hyper-local site must aggregate content from all sources. The recession may have at least one positive effect, leading to consolidation of local media sources and reducing fragmentation.
• I would insist that reporters, editors and ad reps for these publications live in the neighborhoods they cover, and promote the work of local bloggers. I don't think national corporate aggregator sites will be able to attract a critical mass of local advertisers.
• Hyper-local sites should take advantage of the viral marketing capability of Facebook, and the ability of FB to promote hyperlocal content in status updates.

Despite the continuing struggle to find viable business models, hyperlocal web publications as an avocation or a volunteer effort do add value to a community.

I have followed developments in the field for more than a decade and you can find links to the intellligence I've collected here.