I thought a lot and blogged a lot. I traveled to Denver, where I got to talk a lot. I gave birth to my kid nearly a year ago, and when the fog of labor and delivery lifted, I returned to thinking and blogging and talking. But one vital thing was missing: I wasn’t doing a lot. Classes were taken, presentations were attended, but I wasn’t applying what I’d learned. I was book smart, street stupid.

But that’s about to change. Right fucking now.

From this point forward, The Hyperlocalist blog won’t be a retrospective analysis or an experiment conducted in a vacuum. Instead, it will follow the development of my new hyperlocal venture — The Jackson Heights (NY) Herald. This will be an online business plan, a test of whether my ideas and those learned along the way will work in the real world.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

Future blog posts will explore the presentation’s seven fists of revenue fury: expertise, events, membership, subscriptions, product sales, donations and advertising re-imagined. Jeremy Caplan, director of the J-school’s center for entrepreneurial journalism and that evening’s presenter, carefully framed these revenue streams with startup businesses in mind, though even experienced hyperlocalists will find them worth a second look.

No discussion of revenue can start without an examination of audience engagement and its importance to the survival of any small business. I’ve yapped previously about a news outlet’s “emotional” value, how the interaction between reporter and reader through a website’s comments section can influence offline, real-life decisions. Advertisers appreciate that influence and recognize how it can work to their advantage. (They can also fear and loathe that influence — Yelp, anyone?) Unfortunately, emotional value as I’ve described it can’t be easily quantified.

Enter Facebook, Twitter and every other form of social media available. One way or another, they all display the number of users who follow a news organization’s account, and engagement is evident through wall posts and retweets. Emotional value finally has a number that advertisers can understand. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg!

The best part: it doesn’t matter if a news organization’s social-media activity detracts from its website’s page views, declared Miral Sattar, founder of the niche site Weddings.Divanee.com. The organization’s influence will continue to have value as long as it engages its audience, whether on its own site or elsewhere, she said during the CUNY J-school presentation.

For example, Sattar’s wedding-oriented site recently asked its audience to choose the best-looking engagement ring from a series of photos posted on its Facebook page, with votes recorded as “likes” for individual images. The activity did nothing to drive participants to the main website (ie, it did not increase the number of page views), yet it demonstrated to potential advertisers the website’s engagement and influence with its audience.

A note on social-networking numbers: bigger isn’t always better. If an organization has to follow 20,000 Twitter users just to get 15,000 to reciprocate, then that’s not value. That’s volume, the same game played by Patch and other large-scale hyperlocal operations. And it’s a game that small, independent hyperlocal sites won’t win.

Even emailed newsletters demonstrate engagement and influence to potential advertisers, Sattar and Caplan described. A long list of subscribers shows readers’ interest in the news outlet (or at least a reluctance to mark the newsletter as spam).

Furthermore, email is still considered a more personal, private form of communication, the speakers suggested. To advertisers, it means an organization has more than its foot in the reader’s door — it’s sitting in that reader’s living room, playing with the family dog, eating chips on the sofa and watching “Glee.” That influence and intimacy counts more to neighborhood advertisers than page views and search-engine optimization.

Here’s a confession: I don’t (and can’t) thank my mother enough. During her brief visit last weekend, she spoon fed my seven-month-old while I indulged in a carefree meal. She carried the kid and kept her entertained while I surfed the net. She lulled the baby to sleep so that I can watch the Mets lose yet another game to the Phillies.

My mom said she didn’t mind the work, that it was all part of spoiling the kid. Surely I didn’t mind having time to vegetate on the couch, even if I didn’t agree with some of my mother’s practices. (Anthony Bourdain as children’s television?) Still I appreciated the opportunity to come up for much needed air.

The mental respite from parenthood allowed me to reflect on the value of family, friends and other forms of support. Obviously, love and friendship go a long way to making life good, but they also pay off in a business sense. My mother’s willingness to take on some of the childcare liberated my mind (if only briefly) to consider the details of my next hyperlocal venture. Thank you, Mom!

Other hyperlocal publications are family affairs through and through, with spouses running the newsroom and kids scanning the police radio. My husband volunteered his photography and videography skills to my previous attempt at hyperlocal news. While he did this only occasionally, it was his way of participating in what became a very personal, time-consuming project for me. (Here’s another confession: I don’t [and can't] thank my husband enough.)

But working with relatives and close friends, or relying on them to manage personal matters, can be tricky. Expectations can be unrealistically high, and criticism can come across as harsh. My husband stewed every time I refused to publish raw video that he spent hours compressing and compiling on the computer. And I banged my head against the wall whenever he skipped details like names, locations and dates.

The only way a hyperlocalist can survive that is to accept a loved one’s help with all its perceived imperfections, knowing that it’s offered with best intentions for the business and the personal relationship. My husband wanted to help, so I let him. Instead of recording continuous footage of a news event, I asked him to film short snippets that were more suitable to my web publication. Also, I asked him to take stock photos of buildings and street scenes, which didn’t rely heavily on dateline details and could be used anytime.

Adjusting my expectations allowed me to delegate clearly defined responsibilities to my husband, without worrying about the impact his work would have on my publication’s brand. In the end, his contributions built a photo bank chock full o’ images worthy of republication (and a modest revenue stream). And his videos were a popular item on my site’s YouTube page.

If he volunteers to shoot photos for my future publication, I’d welcome him into the newsroom. And if my mom wants to fatten up my kid while watching the Travel Channel, that’s okay too.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jon Haynes Photography. This post also appears on my personal blog Question the Wisdom.

First, the wince. Cotte Griffiths announced that she and her business partner, Brad Rourke, were pulling the plug on their Rockville (Md) Central news website. After three and a half years in publication, both had grown tired of juggling content creation and advertising sales, she told me. Furthermore, competition from Patch, another indie website, the local print publication and the municipal government’s site made their reporting redundant, Rourke blogged.

Then came the smile. Rockville Central would live on as a news source through its Facebook page, where their fans were already gabbing about current events. With a combination of news aggregation and original reporting, “we can create a true community hub,” Cotte Griffiths wrote.

And then the knee slap. Even though Cotte Griffiths and Rourke won’t generate advertising revenue from their Facebook page, they can establish themselves as social-media experts with tabs on the local vibe. That can translate into serious revenue from social-media consulting, building an online presence for small businesses, nonprofit groups and even government agencies.

Then another knee slap. Facebook is already a mobile-friendly service, whether one uses its mobile website or a native (platform-specific) app. That gives the Rockville Central fan page greater reach without having to “mobilize” its own website or develop an expensive app. The technical witchcraft has already been done for them.

And still another knee slap. Cotte Griffiths and Rourke can take their social-media savvy onto Twitter, where they can generate revenue from sponsored tweets. Also, they can use the multimedia-heavy publishing platform Tumblr to build a portfolio of marketable stock photos or to publish original audio or video content, though Tumblr’s community of users is still small relative to Facebook and Twitter.

By the time I reached the closing salutations of Cotte Griffiths’ message, my knee was swollen from the slapping and I was swearing up a storm. (“Fucking genius!” came up a lot.) Sure, they’d have to stay ahead of the social-media curve in case some future service turns Facebook into MySpace. In the meantime, they can provide hyperlocal information, foster dialog among neighbors, and make bank as consultants.

One day after our Facebook exchange, the news of Rockville Central’s transition had made its way through Twitter. And by Wednesday evening, members of the Online News Association were talking about it at a mixer inside the offices of The New York Times. Some were intrigued, others were disappointed that local news would take this route.

I’m hitting the “like” button on this one.

Illustration courtesy of Flickr user Christopher S. Penn.

Every four years, journalists descend upon Iowa, stalking would-be leaders of the free world as they shake hands, kiss babies and eat their weight in pancakes. However, the upcoming 2012 campaign season promises to have a hyperlocal twist to it. Arianna Huffington, newly appointed overlord to AOL’s content-producing properties, plans to use Patch.com editors to cover the election on a “granular” level, she told The Washington Post.

Huffington’s plan is genius: employ an army of already-embeds who won’t need lodging or driving directions, and let them lay the foundation for AOL’s larger, search engine-savvy campaign coverage. “We will have thousands and thousands of people covering the election. Covering the Republicans. Covering the Democrats. Just being transparent about it,” she said.

And that’s when my heart sank. Reporting on elections can be a major drain on hyperlocal news outlets, especially those with limited human resources. So how the hell are independent hyperlocalists supposed to compete with myriad minions of The Huffington Patch?

First, they can beat Patch to the punch. Indie hyperlocalists in states with high-profile primaries (Iowa and New Hampshire, for example), as well as those in the convention cities of Charlotte and Tampa, should immediately contact larger news outlets and promote themselves as location experts. If AOL can use its hypothetical Des Moines Patch editor (more likely, someone from its Seed content farm) to blanket the Iowa caucuses, surely The New York Times and CNN can pay Cedar Rapids‘ independent hyperlocalist to work the beat.

(Incidentally, hyperlocalists from Super-Duper Tuesday states are not shit out of luck when it comes to milking the campaign coverage. They can similarly promote themselves to NPR or some other large outlet as experts in their beat’s hot topic — unemployment, gay marriage, the effect of prolonged deployment on military families, whatever.)

Notice my use of the word “pay.” The time and energy required to cover a campaign deserve appropriate compensation from whomever is doing the hiring. National exposure will not fuel a hyperlocal news outlet while its resources are diverted to the campaign trail.

To earn that living wage, independent hyperlocalists must offer coverage that encompasses more than just the who, what and where. The material must deliver a distinct local flavor and offer unique insight into how political events and the populace interact. This connection with place, and the ability to drop a reader smack in the middle of it, will distinguish the independent hyperlocalist from a Patch editor or embedded big-media reporter.

Ultimately, if a hyperlocal news site can’t beat Patch’s campaign coverage, it should join it — sort of. Local Patch sites likely will create RSS (syndication) feeds for their campaign stories, which can then stream onto a hyperlocal news site’s sidebar. Thus, the independent hyperlocal site offers its readers a portal to political coverage without having to create content.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Carl Wycoff.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: I have a love/hate relationship with The New York Times. Its aloof, elitist tone dings my psyche like a supermarket shopping cart and renders my self-esteem a pockmarked jalopy. That’s the hate part, by the way.

Now here’s the love part. Last week, The Times published two articles that should give independent hyperlocalists new hope in competing with the local Patch outlet, soon to be governed by the Google-savvy Arianna Huffington.

Both articles discuss search engine optimization (SEO), the internet voodoo that boosts a website’s prominence in search results. It’s the bread and butter of The Huffington Post, why AOL coughed up $315 million — most of it cash money — to buy the current-events blog, and why Huffington is getting paid $4 million annually to run Patch and AOL’s other content-generating properties.

SEO is often associated with what I call the bieberfication of journalism: the monetization of current events, though not necessarily of news. For example, The Huffington Post monitors the web for popular search-engine queries — tween heartthrob Justin Bieber is hot shit these days — and then generates content around that subject. A tell-tale headline, copy chock full of key words, and a fine-tuned URL bump The Post’s article to the top of search results, thus increasing its page views and advertising revenue.

Patch sites are likely to follow Huffington’s modus operandi, loading their sites with juicy content for the search engine spiders. That means articles with “accident,” “shooting,” “fire” and other sensational topics as key words. After all, how many hits can “local zoning laws” squeeze out of a Google search?

But just as Patch can score high with those words, so can independent hyperlocalists. Loading key words into an article’s headline, lede and URL (if possible) can improve its standing against Patch in search engine results. After that, it’s up to the hyperlocalist’s writing, reporting skills and rapport with the audience to cash in on that search result and convert the incidental visitor into a regular reader.

Another SEO trick — this one pulled by retailer JC Penney — is to link and be linked to other websites, even unrelated or abandoned sites, The Times reported. More than 2,000 websites linked to the JC Penney home page, thus boosting its standing in search results for dresses, bedding, area rugs and other assorted stuff. Google considers this practice verboten and can knock a website off its spiders’ radar as punishment, but it’s still done. (Reps for the JC Penney Co. deny any chicanery.)

Hyperlocalists can work this angle by linking to area blogs and regional news sites, and hope that these sites will reciprocate. They can also leave comments on other sites and include a link back to their own. Ideally, these comments will add to the online conversation and not just serve as obvious (and obnoxious) self-promotion. A thoughtful and intelligent comment can attract more readers to a hyperlocalist’s site, whether or not the link optimizes search-engine standing.

While SEO draws readers to a website, quality content ultimately keeps readers (and advertisers) coming back for more. And it’s that quality that keeps an anxious Arianna Huffington awake at night.

Photo of Arianna Huffington courtesy of The New York Times.

One thing that didn’t get past my sleep-deprived eyes during my maternity leave was news that TBD.com was ending advertising sales for its affiliates. Launched last summer, TBD reports local news in and around Washington, DC, and serves as a portal to more than 200 hyperlocal news sites and blogs. The idea behind its affiliate network was to build sales strength in numbers: TBD would act as an ad server, and participating websites would get a cut of the advertising revenue.

Everyone and their brother watched closely to see whether this model would finally turn a buck on online local and hyperlocal news. But by the end of November, TBD announced it was pulling the plug on this program. “Unfortunately, the advertising aspect of the network has not taken off as effectively as the traffic and linking relationship,” Steve Buttry, TBD’s director of community engagement, wrote.

I’m not privy to exactly what went wrong, but here are some things an ad network might do to get things right:

Start small. According to TBD, one quarter — about 50 — of its affiliates participated in the ad network. But that number might have diluted its value. It’s the danger of doing a volume business: If demand can’t move all that ad-space inventory, then the ad server and its affiliates are shit out of luck.

Instead, a network of ten or fewer websites might offer advertisers a more targeted audience and, therefore, a more valuable piece of advertising real estate. The network might not sell as many ads, but it won’t have to if it can charge a premium for its space.

Love thy neighbor. Offering advertisers a targeted audience means limiting network affiliates to a specific geographic area, maybe a single county or city. In a large market like New York, a successful network might represent just two or three adjacent neighborhoods.

A network that stretches across several counties or states (as TBD’s network does) can actually lock out advertisers who draw on sizable yet geographically focused markets. The chain-restaurant operator knows whether her food is worth a 30-minute car ride across state lines, or just a stumble across the street. She won’t spend money to advertise with a large network if her only interest is in a local or hyperlocal market.

Work it like Goldilocks. Sure, everyone wants loving from big advertisers and their big ad budgets, and no one wants to hustle for ad revenue from mom-and-pop shops. But an ad network might succeed in courting regional sponsors who have modest ad budgets and value the opportunity to speak and sell directly to core markets. It’s an approach that’s not too big, not too small, but just right.

I don’t know how much (if any) of this advice addresses TBD’s specific woes, but I do hope they find the right fit for their business structure. Git ‘r done.

Illustration of Larry the Cable Guy courtesy of Joe Bluhm.

I’m off to have my baby! Blog posts will resume on “The Hyperlocalist” in early 2011. In the meantime, you can follow my exploits in “Question the Wisdom: A New Mom in New Media” on Tumblr.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user sean dreilinger.

ZING! It hurt like hell, but it was the truth. When news audiences receive free content, they no longer count as customers. They’re not dropping coin to keep the lights on or the servers running. They don’t pay for writers’ salaries. And even if they contribute “emotional” value to a news outlet through reader comments, that value doesn’t do jack for a business if it doesn’t translate into dollars and cents.

In my previous attempt at hyperlocal news, I placed the audience’s satisfaction ahead of business development. It was a colossal mistake. Readers loved my frank restaurant reviews as much as restaurant owners hated them, and that meant an enormous loss of potential advertising revenue from the neighborhood’s largest industry.

This time, I hope to develop my audience and customer base simultaneously without jeopardizing the quality of my publication’s content. Here’s how:

Extend services unrelated to my publication to residents and the business community. One of the revenue streams I plan to pursue is group-discount brokering (the Groupon model). To make it work, I need a mailing list of prospective shoppers (an audience) and business customers willing to offer these shoppers a discount. To build this mailing list, I plan to attend local meet-ups to learn what residents want or need from their community, and to gently introduce the idea of group discounts. Call it market research.

That information becomes leverage when approaching business customers for group discounts. It also brings together an otherwise non-paying audience with paying customers, without selling out a news outlet’s integrity.

Build my publication’s audience slooooooowly. Since setting up a beta site earlier this month, I’ve posted only two stories. But I’ve used Twitter to publicize my organization as a news source, mostly by retweeting neighborhood-specific stories from larger news outlets and by posting photos. So far, I have 13 followers, and that’s fine with me.

This modest following allows me to test different things, from writing style and voice, to website design. The publication’s slow, deliberate development also gives me the opportunity to educate customers (in this case, advertisers) on how my business operates, not as a quick hustle but as the next evolutionary step in advertising.

Those are my first two steps in building the business, though I should keep a few spare ideas in my pocket should neither of these approaches work.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user chillhiro.

Well, I’m proud (and terrified) to announce that my new hyperlocal project is “cooking with oil.” The beta site is running, the Twitter feed is tweeting, and a Tumblr blog is tracking its progress. Cosmetic improvements are in the works, as is a mobile-friendly site. With luck, the full Monty will launch next spring.

But there are a number of questions on the business end that need answers, or at least clues. How does one conduct market research on the hyperlocal level? And who or what constitutes the true market? How far does personality go in promoting or harming a publication’s success?

I’ve had Twitter discussions (twiscussions?) with fellow hyperlocalists on some of these matters, and I’ll share their thoughts and my own in the next few posts.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user SETmariposa.