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If ever there were a story made for hyperlocal media, it’d be gentrification, right? What issue is more likely to spur resident interest and reader engagement? How better for a local paper or neighborhood website to demonstrate the unique grasp its staff has on the history and character of its community than in covering the threat and reality of change? If only it were easier to pay for all that expertise and to compete with other demands on reader attention. If only it were a simpler story to begin with.
Veralyn Williams, the managing editor of Brooklyn Deep (a relatively new hyperlocal site for Central Brooklyn with which City Limits has been lucky to partner in the past) and host of its excellent Third Rail podcast invited me on last week to chat with her and executive editor Mark Winston-Griffith about hyperlocal news and the gentrification story. Give it a listen:
2 Comments
Inspector Spacetime
I think the problem here has more to do with the overall informal, blog-like standards that a lot of hyperlocal media sustain. Not all, but many, fail to fill the niche abandoned by more and more (formerly) traditional media. If you have an opinion, you will have no problem finding some hyperlocal media source to support it. So few maintain a sustained sense of impartial professionalism because it’s expensive to do so.
There were problems when there were just four channels and 10 newspapers, no doubt. We should at least have a sense of the quality for our news sources. There should be some kind of publicly-accessible quality matrix rating news sources. Even if no one ever achieves a ’10’ in any given metric, I’d prefer to know when I’m reading a source with a history of being a single-issue advocate with a mediocre factual reliability, receiving 60% of its revenue streams from sources discussed in the content.
RIKKI
the only reason for gentrification is the locals have given up on the area. there was no need to live in ghetto conditions, high crime and massive functional illiteracy.
so people came in with dreams and money and wanted to rebuild.