Introduction and Narrative: In February of 2005 Lisa Willaims started H2OTown (www.h2otown.info). She had recently left her job and wanted to get to know Watertown Massachusetts better, but decided to do her learning process in public. H2OTown also allowed others in the area to blog, creating a townhall atmosphere. It is what Williams calls a “placeblog,” which focus on the lived experiences in that geographic area. “And if we are lucky, most lived experience is news,” says Williams. A placebloger doesn’t “report” the news, they share news that happens in their lives.

Placeblogger.com is the largest index of placeblogs which can help anyone find local bloggers in their community. It was motivated by a desire to find out just how many placeblogs there really are. At BloggerCon IV a bet between Williams, Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen broke out about this very topic. Rosen wondered how many placeblogs like H2OTown existed, to which Williams guessed 1,000.

Within the first day after its launch, January 2007, Placebloger.com was indexing placeblogs from 55 different countries. To date Placeblogger.com has indexed 3,500 placeblogs. Williams won the bet three times over.

Main Goal(s):

H2OTown: “To make Watertown a less boring place to live.” The blog network is not journalistic in nature. Civic participation and being a conduit of newsworthy information is a byproduct, not the motivating factor, of H2OTown. The real goal of H2OTown is to highlight the aspects of the community that make it unique but are hidden from people, says Williams.

“Placebloggers have a rock and hammer and are breaking through that and sharing that information in a group activity.”

Placeblogger: To find and index as many placeblogs as possible, so they can connect and learn from each other.

Notable Achievements:

H2OTown: “That the blog is still around,” says Williams. Sixty-six percent of all blogs are abandoned in the first month. Today, people feel a sense of ownership over the site, which has a life of its own, and that’s the hard part for a hyperlocal site.

Placeblogger: Placeblogger has been successful, incorporating a larger global community than expected spanning 55 countries and 3,500 blogs. Recently Placeblogger won a Knight News Challenge grant and will expand from there.

A Surprising Realization: The statistics from Placeblogger.com. There were more placeblogs than Williams expected. Comparing census data alongside that Williams found that almost a third of the U.S. lives in a town with a placeblog.

In terms of placeblogs, Williams is astounded by how complex and different they all are from each other. They haven’t settled on a convention, there is no common theme or vocabulary, “yet the format and overarching idea is pretty much the same — they are going to cover the mayors office, elections, school budgets, etc.,” says Williams. Despite similarities, to date there is no community for placebloggers.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: The assumption that a community will pop out of thin air instantly because you’ve started a website. One has to be ready to commit six months to a year before they can expect results. “You can’t speed up the process of creating an organic community,” says Williams. If participation is not instant, one shouldn’t feel as if they failed.

“But I don’t think of any experiment as a failure — they all produce data — “this doesn’t work” is a useful piece of data. My strategy has been to experiment a lot and keep the cost low.”

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Introduction and Narrative: Fresno Famous launched April 1st, 2004 when Jarah Euston moved back to Fresno from New York. In her early 20’s and feeling alienated from her home town Euston had no idea what Fresno had to offer in terms of night life or a music scene. That was the imputes of Fresno Famous, a user-generated catalog of entertainment listings including music, film, shows, art galleries, etc. Fresno Famous eventually became a centralized location for anyone in the Fresno community looking for something to do.

The original site, a labor of love, was updated by hand every week in static HTML. Eventually, Fresno Famous switched over to Drupal which allowed everyone to post directly to the site and enabled forums, comments and blog posts. It has also become a hub for people to get informed about city council meetings, school board decisions and local politics in general. Today the site is totally user-driven.

Main Goal of Fresno Famous: To make Fresno a better place to live. As small farming communities, Fresno and Modesto have reputations of being “the armpit of California and that’s not really true. There is a lot of great talent there — but the community is very fragmented they might not know about local politics, music or events,” says Euston. “Fresno Famous provides one place for everyone to feed on everything that we thought was good about the town.”

Notable Achievements: As a community center Fresno Famous has played an active role in the discussion of downtown Fresno’s redevelopment. In one particular instance, plans for a project on Broadway Row were released on Fresno Famous to a hailstorm of complaints that eventually convinced the city government to cancel the plan.

“Fresno Famous has influenced how the city thinks about the issue…which is a perennial topic of conversation if you live in Fresno,” said Euston.

A Surprising Realization: The first surprise with Fresno Famous was the general timidity of users in the beginning. Euston found that it’s not easy to get people to promote themselves or friends. “We thought once we had Drupal going people would be positing all the time about how great some event was,” says Euston. She found that as community manager she also had to play the role of cheerleader, encouraging and supporting people who were too nervous to post to the site. “Being a blogger, I don’t have a problem with that [postings thoughts online], but a lot of people weren’t sure what to do.”

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Introduction and Narrative: BostonNOW, a free metro paper, launched in April of 2007 after Russell Pergament, most recently from AM New York, hooked up with Dagsbrun, an Icelandic media company, for financial backing. John Wilpers, former editor of the Washington Examiner, was brought on board to help shape the emerging free metro as its editor.

Wilpers had the idea of running excerpts from local Boston blogs on both the website and in the actual print newspaper at a Media Giraffe conference. Slowly Wilpers began to introduce himself to local bloggers in Boston and eventually organized two open meetings. The first gathering was somewhat confrontational, filled with critical and suspicious questions: “Will you edit us? Will you pay us?” etc., but by the second meeting bloggers brought constructive ideas and began to give suggestions for the young paper, says Wilpers.

BostonNOW has become the first US print paper to run content from local bloggers, making the paper “fun, intriguing and reflective of the Boston community,” says Wilpers. The first blog post appeared in the paper May 1st, a few weeks after the initial launch. Since then BostonNOW has registered over 500 Boston bloggers to appear on their website and their paper.

Main Goal of BostonNOW: The goal of the company, as a free daily newspaper, is to grab a healthy market share of readers. BostonNOW, like other free metro papers, serves the market of people that want to consume the important news of the day, but can only spare 20 minutes during their daily commute.

But BostonNOW is also a laboratory to test how a community can be involved in the creation of a print product. That includes everything from the articles that the paper runs to the daily news meetings, which BostonNOW webcasts. “If we don’t involve the community in the direction of the paper, print journalism will become less and less relevant,” says Wilpers.

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Introduction and Narrative: Debra Galant began her journalism career in 1977 and by 1998 was a New Jersey columnist for the New York Times. After the Times gave her column to someone else, Galant received the URL Debragalant.com as a birthday present from her husband. The next three months Galant spent starting a personal typepad blog, “Debra Galant Explains the Universe.” At a meetup for NJ.com to recruit bloggers for their website, she decided to dive straight into the blogosphere. At that meeting she heard the idea of hyperlocal blogging from Jeff Jarvis. Within a few months, she gave up her personal blog and started Baristanet.com, which she was going to turn into a hyerplocal news site that would eventually cover the areas of Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield New Jersey.

By May of 2004, Baristanet launched its beta. Today Galant and co-founder/partner Liz George employ four people working part-time as reporters, graphic artists and technology experts for Baristanet, which is one of the leading placeblogs in the country. The site has gone from 200 to more than 7,000 visits a day and has been recognized as the inspiration for hyperlocal blogs across the country. “For people who live here this is something they become addicted to,” says Galant.

Main Goal of Baristanet: To provide a new model for local news and discussion that is fast, fun and can support itself through online advertising. “Sometimes we refer to it as ‘your local weekly newspaper meets the Daily Show.’” Baristanet is a hybrid of media news and entertainment. The goal is to provide fun coverage of local issues that are important and includes the community that has gathered around the site while creating a sustainable business model at the same time.

An example of hyperlocal coverage: Last summer there was a microburst (like a tornado) in Montclair which devastated 100-year-old trees and “we covered it like crazy…. coverage that we are very proud of” says Galant.

Notable Achievements: Since launching, Baristanet has become a major competitor in the local market, with a bigger circulation in unique visitors online than the Montclair Times, according to Galant. It was named the #1 placeblog in American by Placeblogger.com last January. It has been referenced more than once in The New York Times, which culls its page for story ideas, says Galant.

During a fire induced blackout last summer Baristanet’s traffic increased 50 percent (despite the lack of electricity in many areas). During the emergency situation the site became a powerful resource for the community. In 100 degree weather Baristanet has provided info to the city that even the town website and police weren’t giving says Galant. Whether it’s a manhole explosion, murder or blackout, people come to Baristanet to see if they are covering it, “and if it isn’t covered already, readers send in tip to make sure it is.”

Aside from traditional reporting, the size and local focus has given Baristanet opportunities to experiment in online journalism. From using a Google mash-up to chronicle local development, to using a national polling company to perform hyperlocal polls in each of the three towns it covers (providing a uniquely statistical view of community feelings about specific town issues), Baristanet has set the tone for what hyperlocal news blogs can do.

A Surprising Realization: Even though you may own a publication or an online site, once you open it up to comments it really is an interactive space, says Galant. “Its personality develops on its own. You can set a tone, but it has become something bigger and different.” Strong personalities emerge and have shaped Baristanet into something that Galant never could have envisioned. “The community inhabits it in a way that is strange, sometimes beautiful and sometimes disturbing,” says Galant.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: On a practical level: If Galant could have done it again, she wouldn’t have set up Baristanet to blog on weekends. Unsure when people would read the site during the initial launch, Baristanet had fresh content all week long. She didn’t find out until months later that people tend to read the site Monday through Friday. “But now our readers are spoiled, so we keep up the weekends.”

In her guest post at PressThink Galant also wrote about the lessons learned while working in an immediate medium.

“There’s also the real-time aspect of what can be accomplished by instant publishing. Like telling readers about kids selling lemonade to raise money for Katrina right now, or reporting a high school bomb scare minutes after it happened-– or even just providing an up-to-date community resource for closings and cancellations in the case of snow.”

Money: Baristanet and its four part-time employees are supported by advertising and has been operating in the black for the last two years. Baristanet also pays people to write and do graphics for the ads. Glanat says they often receive five local business advertising inquiries a week and has around 30-40 regular advertisers right now including Realtors, Montclair State University, a local hospital, retailers, services, restaurants and other city institutions.

Future Goals: Conversations with two separate people/organizations are on the table about expanding Baristanet into new cities. Nothing has been decided, but it is something Galant is looking into. Baristanet is also interested in forging alliances with other placeblogs to form ad networks and to share certain content.

What Are you Hoping to Get from other People at the News Innovation Conference?

“We are open for strategic partnerships in terms of expansion. We have an expertise and ability to make the model work and we are looking for capital to make it expand and looking for the right partners.”

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Extra Reading: Galant’s guest post on PressThink (Good personal history)

Liz George’s guest post on PressThink (Her review of Backfence)