I posted a comment on MediaShift on the importance of local news. I thought I’d share it here as well.
It has been clear for a long time that local news is getting more and more prime real estate at any media site, and that the demand for local news is increasing. I read an IDC report last year that spoke about the rise of the local news throught the media sphere.
Personally I think we are moving towards a more localized perspective of any news story. Local news with the proper supporting context is the future. We are moving more towards the mosaic-like presentation where the reader gets all the different angles, twists of the story. The time for the single news story is out and the time has come for the engaging multidiverse news stories. Here I feel many UGC sites still lacks the proper execution. We do not give the UGC accounts the proper real estate at the sites and/or the proper supporting material – perspectives, facts or presentations.
Interesting enough, many people forget that all news is local until media makes it global. News is more or less exclusively local until we as a community makes the local news (event) global by raising the dialogue to a national, regional or global level. Therefore it has always surprised me that we tend to forget the localized perspective of the news stories. Over localizing news such as many UGC sites are currently doing actually makes the news loose the context and becomes uninteresting for most people.
The second interesting fact about local news is that they should be told by the locals, the people who experience the news. We want the real accounts. We need real people to share their views about what they experience locally. That is where this should go like. I know this was spoken about earlier this year here at the Mediashift blog. The cellphone component is here of tremendous importance.
Before I come into too many angles of the subject I think we will see a development where the news transforms into the localized, national, regional and global perspective, yet showing the connection between these different levels guiding the reader what the news really is. In there lies the engagement level ofn the reader and opens up for a whole new set of digestion and participation of news.
