All Entries Tagged With: "newspaper"

When Social Media goes really local…

Two days ago, a quick look at www.boston.com told me that they were introducing a new Twitter feed for my town here on the North Shore. My first reaction was ” “Great! the mainstream media gets it. The Globe is going hyper-local, and engaging with local communities with good relevant content.

In theory, it’s a terrific idea. (The Globe, along with plenty of other big papers out there ) is putting its content out there in different channels. They’re diversifying a bit, and heck, experimenting with this idea to see where it goes. I like the approach. I assume that other big publishers out there are doing or will do, the same thing.

I took a quick look at the recent tweets about the town, and unfortunately (or fortunately?) they all linked back to a direct feed to the boston.com calendar. At first glance, it makes sense, simply feed your content into one place and have other mechanisms deliver it locally. But what I really wanted to see was some personality, some zing, some REAL local perspective on what’s happening in our little town. Then my imagination took hold of me and I wondered….

If this Twitter handle was truly local, wouldn’t it be great if a real, live person would tweet good nuggets of information like: local sports scores, weekly meetings for mother’s clubs, library events, school functions, pictures from a July 4th parade, election announcements, school closings, fundraisers, etc.

The answer probably comes down to money, it usually does, right? I doubt that the Boston Globe has money lying around to pay someone for this.

But, wouldn’t this be a perfect opportunity to build some local allegiance and good will for the Globe by getting someone to do this? It could be an unpaid internship staffed continuously by an ongoing stream of college students, a part-time job for a stay at home mom, a partnership with the local government, library, or day I say, the local paper?

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UPDATE on 9/23/09 at 12:35pm EST

Two more follow up notes here:

I found a great example of a how a local community is doing this type of micro-reporting, at least on Twitter. They are a married couple living on the island of Martha’s Vineyard (here in Massachusetts) updating their followers with great news, local insight, and some personality. There’s no agenda here, either. They are happily tweeting news from the Island of Martha’s Vineyard to whomever is listening. Love the Vineyard or just interested in what they do? Follow them at twitter.com/mvtweets

Met a reporter today from the Salem News- a local paper here on the North Shore, and he’s doing exactly that- he’s reporting news from Danvers via Twitter. And, like Adam from Advent Creative says, suggested, he too wants to start a conversation with members of the local community via Twitter and more.

I’m excited to see this part of social media evolve- do YOU have any favorite “micro-journalists?”