What is Hyperlocal?

Hyperlocal is about local and/or niche communities. A journalist's job is to report -- to tell stories, but often 'smaller' stories get pushed aside for those of global or widespread interest.

Barbara Zelizer and Stuart Allan, authors of Keywords in News and Journalism Studies, define hyperlocal journalism as "local news taken to the extreme."

Several start up journalism publications came about because someone with an interest or passion regarding a particular subject decided to report on it where mainstream news media failed to do so.

In this way, many people become accidental journalists, because they are in the right place at the right time and decide to report on a situation. Then there are those who become journalists because the main stream media is not giving any airtime to the subject they are passionate about. These citiziens decide to explore their topic themselves and create their own publications and discourse. This is hyper local.

Short video about the importance of traditional hyperlocal journalism

(Credit: Cardiff University)

Traditional journalism is local. However with globalisation and increased digital takeover, journalism is now much more global. Hyperlocals can be seen as an attempt to go back to what news and journalism was -- coverage of local, and relatively signifcant stories.

Hyper local journalism is traditionally defined as journalism about a specific place and local community. However with the rise of globalisation, and cultural changes, 'local' has many different meanings.

Traditional

Hannah Keep - Journalism student

(Credit: City University)

Traditional

Hyperlocal journalism used to be only about local communities and local news. It has now evolved to mean journalism about communities of people united by a particular niche interest, common cause or situation.

From location, to arts interest, to profession - there are many different hyperlocal news outlets.

Hyperlocal journalism is increasingly about representing those that the mainstream media misses. This is one of the reasons it remains a (reasonably) future-proof area of journalism, because niche and specialist communities will always exist.

Current

Want to see hyperlocal journalism in action?

Have a look at the Examples page

HERE

The journalism industry as a whole faces many challenges and pressures.

One of the biggest barriers for hyperlocal publications is lack of funding.

As a community of people who for the most part work voluntarily on finding journalistic content, it is a hinderance to them trying to find the funding to produce quality content. This also means they need to do an extra thorough job of verifying facts -- as they don't have the resources to do this as quickly as larger corporations.

Another challenge the industry faces is lack of representation. Many hyperlocal sites do not get much traffic - specifically because they are hyperlocal. The lack of traffic becomes an issue when you haven't got the finances to expand your publication readership in other ways. The only traffic they receive is from those specifcially interested in the site.

Hyperlocal journalism may not be seen as very important, because it isn't tackling big global issues, rather only niche topics. This means their stories are unlikely to break into the mainstream journalism.