More impressive coverage for “hyper-local” media darlings Outside.in and Everyblock, this time in the New York Times. Venture capitalists have pumped $7.5 million into aggregator Outside.in and the Knight Foundation has given Everyblock a $1.1 million grant.
Of course, neither is actually local, rather they work in a host of cities from afar, cobbling together data sets, blog posts and news site feeds. But the Times doesn’t focus on that aspect, choosing instead to ask the “but what is the business model?” question. And, “what will they aggregate if newspapers continue to go out of business?” Not clear. But I’m glad to see these and other experiments underway.
From the Local Democracy blog in the U.K…
There’s a really good, detailed bit of reporting here from Friday’s Guardian about the near-collapse of local newspapers in some areas.
The starting point that Stephen Moss chose was my old local paper when I was young – The Long Eaton Advertiser.
This bit stood out for me:
“For the older generation, these things matter. “They want to know who’s passed away,” says the barman at the Corner Pin down the road, “and to check it’s not them.” But the younger generation don’t much care. Carl and Katrina Smith, a married couple in their mid-30s, not only didn’t know the paper had closed; they didn’t even know its name – and they were born nearby and have lived in the town most of their lives. They did, though, occasionally buy the Nottingham Evening Post – mainly for the jobs. For this generation, Long Eaton as a place has almost ceased to exist, lost in a more amorphous Nottingham-Derby conurbation.
“It’s only the older people who think of communities now,” says Carl. “For us it’s more a place to live than a community.” He was an electrician’s mate and worked all over the country (until he was laid off two months ago – people are as vulnerable as papers in the slump); Katrina works in Leicester. Long Eaton is a dormitory for them; they rent a house and say they have no idea who their neighbours are.”
That’s a problem. Front Porch Forum and other efforts are part of a solution.
Friend and colleague Linda Gionti is reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers. She shared this with me…
It’s about a phenomenon discovered in Roseto, Pennsylvania in the 1950’s. It was a town made up of transplants from Roseto, Italy. One physician noted that he rarely saw heart disease in anyone under 65 from Roseto. Another doctor got curious about this, because that was virtually unheard of–this was the time before cholesterol-lowering drugs and heart attacks were an epidemic in the US. He studied the entire population of Roseto. They thought perhaps it was because they brought their Mediterranean diet with them but no, the Rosetans had adopted American eating habits and had problems with obesity. So they started to look at Roseto itself.
“They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.”
“In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.”
… “Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were–on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.”
Good to think that our work with Front Porch Forum is helping people stay healthy!
According to new study from the UVM Center for Rural Studies, 66% of Vermont households surveyed report having high speed internet access. About 79% said that broadband was available where they lived.
Overall nearly 82% of polled households have an Internet connection. Of connected households, 18% had dial-up, 24% had a cable modem, 42% had DSL, nearly 7% had satellite Internet, 6% had a wireless Internet service, and 3% had fiber-optic or some other service. Generally anything faster than dial-up is considered to be broadband, although speeds may vary.
Lots more detail in the survey results… e.g., 73% of “respondents were in favor of an effort exclusively in fiber-optic infrastructure.”
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more