Part 1 – The Future of Local Media: Background

This is the first in a series of posts on the future of local media that in the end I will aggregate together to produce a short whitepaper. My goal is to share my thoughts as well as pull together insight from many others into a synthesis or “fuller view” of what the future of local media might look like in 3-5 years time. We will also start to develop a useful blueprint or roadmap for local media. This is an ambitious undertaking for me but one I am determined to tackle.

The impetus for this series of posts comes out of the insights and debate we recently had at The Local Social Summit in London (more on this event later). This along with debate and comments from many other commentators around online media echo similar ideas (For example: Jeff Jarvis | Martin Langeveld | Sebastien Provencher | Greg Sterling and many others that I will link and refer to as we go ). So, I figure its time to pull together my thinking and lay out some predictions.

I am not alone in thinking the next 18-24 months will continue to be very interesting for local media. We will  see more rapid changes to how consumers access local media and lots of evolution on the social side. I also can see a revolution in business models approaching…

Looking Glass Concept - very cool & from Japan

Here’s the initial outline of what the series will cover:

• Background
• Challenges for traditional media companies
• Broadly how online changes the rules
• Features and functions for consumers
• Business models
• Scenarios and Examples
• Summary

By local media I am talking about online digital media that covers local geographic areas usually at the county, city and town level (but is can be as wide a single country if it’s a small one like say Ireland; and it can be smaller all the way down to hyperlocal – ie, a neighborhood). This is the traditional realm in the offline world of local newspaper, the yellow pages, local broadcaster, classifieds, radio and even some magazines. Online we have these same players plus lots of pure plays like Google, Yahoo, Yelp, TrustedPlaces, Qype, Local People, Ireland.com and many others. I should also add that much of what I will discuss is applicable to other online media types and should translate very well for niche and verticals.

I will get more into the challenges for local media in the next post but I want to seed this thread with the concept of how online ‘flattens’ the world for digital media. By flatten I am talking that once online traditional offline players now often compete with everyone and can easily move into new territory. Google of course is an example of this in that they offer news, local listings, maps, video, etc, etc. Another example is a local newspaper can now easily offer local news video content. The offline tradition of a media owner helps define its area of expertise, business model and content but once online this matter less. I am going to call this flattener number 1 “universal competition” – you compete with everyone and anyone can compete with you. Additionally, I see 2 other key trends that flatten the landscape further (1) access to cheap/free publishing tools to anyone – including video; and (2) user control (not just user-generated content.

To summaries my top 3 flattening trends are:

• Universal competition
• Ubiquitous access to publishing tools
• User control

In part 2 – I will outline the challenges I see for local media online.