The New Video News Network !

I have been writing a lot about the future of news and where it will take us.....will it be all video, streams of media, all mobile, or will the newspaper somehow survive.  Nobody knows for certain, but one could take a very calculated guess and point towards video / mobile.  I had also talked about a new type of news site that we were building to incorporate into OurTown.com as well as have it stand on its own......VNN ( Video News Network).  

VNN is going to be a video network (much like YouTube), but it is focused on local news and local happenings.  Regular people will be able to upload video in real time to the network as the actual news is happening.  Then our users can view and browse this content through many categories including down the the zip code.  VNN will eventually have "video editors" who can do 3 essential things.....curate the news, comment on the news and create social interaction with viewers as they respond to the news. . We will also have a strict admin control over the site so that it doesn't turn into a YouTube with many off topic videos and keep it limited to what is important to the site and its users.

VNN will become that place for local news stations to upload their daily broadcasts, amateur journalist to upload their findings and breaking stories via video, and also a perfect place for any vlogger !  Since we are incorporated into YouTube itself (meaning our VNN videos get the YouTube video SEO treatment) we become the best choice for these types of users.

We are in the beginning stages of VNN and will hopefully grow into our own over this coming year.  I invite you to check out the BETA site and let us know what you think in the comments.

BETA site - VNN

Your OurTown Superhero,
Chris

Who can make Hyper-Local News work?

I have looked at many hyper-local news networks over the past few years and many of them had some of the same qualities and features.....but none of them really succeeded in their plan to take over the online hyper-local news space.  A lot of them either went out of business, re-vamped their idea, or sold the site to another hyper-local network.  There are some like Patch.com which are still operating, but have such a high operational cost that they lose millions each month!  So far nobody has the right answer, and hopefully that changes in 2012.

If the answer isn't found in 2012 it won't be for a lack of trying!  So many people are trying to build the right network and there are so many existing companies re-vamping their business model that I predict an online local news overload in 2012.  But the question still remands on what is the right formula on creating a huge hyper-local news network that is profitably.   I won't clam to know the formula, but I can tell you a few problems or issues that will need to be answered to get it done:

1) Local Ad Revenue

Many hyper-local sites are basing most of their revenue off of the sales of local advertisements and a lot of them are expecting way too much money and going about it all wrong!  The first mistake I see on most of these sites is when they divide up the areas, they do not take into account what a normal sales area would cover.  They have the areas split up into "hyper-local" news areas and then when they try to obtain local advertisements they usually cover too small of an area and do not reach enough people to satisfy the local business owner.

Another huge mistake is they predict too much money out of the sale of local advertisements.  They don't take into account that when selling on such a local level that the ad prices go way down compared to a regional ad.  So they do not set up the right budget per town or area within the network causing them to lose money even though they might be making good progress. 

Some how the local ad revenue model has to be figured out and fast or none of these sites will be turning a profit anytime soon.

2) The Hyper-Local Network Staff

This is a huge issue with many of the hyper-local new sites and networks....who runs the sites, how do we pay them, and how do we find them!  It is really important to get the right people writing the stories and covering the local events, but how to you find them?  Also, once you have found the right type of people what is your model for paying them (keeping in mind how much you can have as overhead cost compared to what you hope to make out of each site)?  These are really important questions because you can keep your cost down, but you might not find the right people.  But then if you find the right people and they cost too much your site loses money no matter how good the content.

Then comes the question of once you have your writers, local editors, site editors, etc. who will sell the local advertising or national advertising?  Some have tried to have the local editor sell the advertising or even  be in charge of getting leads and neither have worked out.  Some have tried have a sales team based in other cites to call into the local communities to obtain advertising and they hasn't worked either.

Once you figure out what the correct staff is and the correct cost of the staff in comparison to the income of a site you will finally have the winning combination.


I think that once those two main issues are truly solved then someone is going to have a real shot at creating a hyper-local news network that will work and be profitability.  Until this happens you will see many hyper local news sites appear and disappear overtime along with many underwhelming sites.  I know OurTown is working in a new "formula" this year to try and figure out these issues, but it is going to be interesting to see who wins this race!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris 

Year End - OurTown.com

We only have a few more days until the new year and I wanted to wrap up this year with a look back at OurTown over the course of 2011 and our focus on the future!

This year was a rapid year of change for OurTown.com!  We have added many features, many local editors, expanded our reach (to the UK!), had many site changes and so on.  I just want to highlight the major changes, additions, and departures.

New Features:

Over the course of the year we added and changed many features to keep our local editors with the best possible features to help them produce great content.  Below is a short highlight list of some of these changes:

- New "upload" feature which allows our local editors to upload PDF's, PowerPoint's, and any other type of document that would not be considered a news article.

- New "Comment Counter" to help show our local editors and viewers which stories were popular and held a great conversation.

- New "Manage Islands" feature that allowed our local editors to curate their pages faster and easier.

- We changed our video feature from a "YouTube Insert" option to a "in-house" build full video feature that allows our local editors (and viewers who submit video) to upload many different types of video and to properly SEO tag every individual video.

- New "Social Media Bar" which allows our users and local editors to connect their stories and content to many different social media sites including - Facebook / Twitter / and Google+.

- Also, we added a new "Language Converter" which allowed our users to select from many different languages across the world to view our site with!

Site Changes:

Also, during the course of this year we made some major changes to the structure of OurTown and how it operated.  Below is a short highlight list of these changes:

- OurTown expanded its reach and area listings to the United Kingdom!  We have sites now in Seaford, Newhaven, Peacehaven, and Lewes within East Sussex. We plan on continuing to put our main focus on the expansion of sites within the United States, but will also concentrate on building our presence in the United Kingdom!

- OurTown also went back to its business plan of an 80/20 split of the local ads between the local editors and OurTown Media.  We had talked about many different plans that would help build a true revenue stream (to help sustain a hyper local network, unlike Patch.com), and we felt that this split would be the easiest and most fair to everyone involved.

- Also, at the end of 2010 we were building a completely new site for OurTown, which took a lot more time than expected and ran into a lot of "road blocks".  We still plan on putting out a new design in the new year and also to continuous work on feature and site changes that will benefit OurTown, the local editors, and the viewers!


People Changes:

I also just wanted to briefly touch on the fact that we have added many new local editors, but also had some departures do to many reasons.  Our goal during 2011 was to figure out the true definition of the person who can run their own OurTown site.  We focused on keeping our good local editors who built and maintained their sites within our guidelines and who also shared the same goals.  As for the rest we slowly deactivated their sites and returned to recruitment to add local editors who would help the site! 

The Future:

OurTown.com has come a long way since we put the site live at the end of 2007 and we have learned many things throughout our journey.  This coming year will be no different!  We have much to do and to learn and plan on introducing new changes to the site within the first couple of months in 2012.  Are only hope is that you join us through our adventure in 2012 and we believe that it is going to be a great year!

We hope everyone had a good Holiday and hope that everyone has a great New Year!

Thank you!


From Everyone at OurTown.com !

Building Your Own Community Site!

You are a passionate community member who keeps involved and up to date with everything going on in and with your community.  The only problem is that most people are unaware of a lot of things happening because your local news / community source is missing those events or doesn't have the time to cover it.  So how do you fix this problem and get the community updates and news to the people who want it?  That is when someone needs to step up and create their own community news site!  In the past most people would have thought this type of ideal to be impossible, but now with all the new innovations it is very possible!  The first thing you have to do is figure out what is needed to start this type of news outlet and how you will approach and run the news outlet.

More people than you think run into the above situation and get to the final questions of what and how on building a local news outlet, but get stuck there and stop.  Most people think that it is just going to be too much work, or that they will put all this time into the outlet and get nothing in return. This could be the case if you don't know the right answers to those vital questions - what is needed to start / how are you going to run it.  This is where I come in....to answer the questions and give all of those people the hope and assurance that it can be done and they can do it!

What is Needed?

1) First you need to figure out what platform you will use to distribute your news.  Most likely you will choose an online platform since print is slowly dying out and the costs keep going up.  So once you figure out that you want to be an online community news source you must figure out if you are going to pay someone to build you a custom website, are you going to just use one of the blogging platforms, are you going to use one of the social platforms, or are you going to join an existing network.

2) Once you pick which online source you are going to use then you need to figure out if you are going to create and maintain this outlet alone or are you going to enlist some help from friends, business partners, or fellow community members.  Figuring this out in the beginning will really help in the planning of maintaining the site.

3)  Now that you have your platform and team members you are going to need to figure out if you are going to run this site out of the goodness of your heart or would you like to benefit financially as well.  This will also help determine if you picked the right platform as some are more inclined to making revenue.  You will also need to decide how much revenue you need to either make it worth your time or keep the site going.

4)  Next you need to make sure you have the equipment needed to cover and report on certain happenings and events.  Mostly you will need some way to take pictures (possibly video) and a way to get notes and/or write a story on location.  Most of these are very low cost and easy to come by.

5) The last major "Need" on my list is motivation!  A lot of people think it is a great idea to do this or go in very strong, but over time stop producing.  You need to make sure that you have the motivation to get things started strong and to keep up with your outlet and to put the hardship in to make a good news source.  Now in the beginning you will have more work, but as time passes it becomes less work and comes easier to manage.


How to Run / Manage your News Outlet .

1)  First you need to figure out the winning combination to reach your full audience potential.  This can be done by a combination of using your own site / social media / newsletters / connecting to bigger sites and so on.  I would recommend to start out by building and promoting your own site and then pushing those stories out to different social media sites.   Make sure to try out different combinations, because different outlets work better for different communities.

2)  Next you will want to make a plan!  Figure out how many hours a week you want to dedicate to your news site and what type of events / happenings you would like to cover.  This is important because if you don't set up a plan you can start spending too much time or too little time working on your news site and both have effects on your viewers and you as a person.

3)  Make sure to have a revenue plan in place and execute on a monthly basis.  In the beginning you will want to build up your content / viewership / networking / and promoting.  Once you have a good readership built then obtaining advertising / sponsorships /  paid classifieds and so on will not be that difficult.  Make sure to set sales goals and set a revenue number you want to hit monthly to make sure it stays worth it!

Now there are many things to do when setting up your own local news outlet / site and many more to carry out while running and managing the site.  Above I have listed many important points and tips that will help out a lot in the beginning.  If you are looking for more help / tips make sure to check out OurTown.com or email us at Support@OurTown.com.


Your OurTown Hero,

Chris

Future of News !

Listeners of the World,

Today I woke up and immediately opened up my laptop to find out our voting results on the many issues and candidates up for election in my state.  Then I proceeded to grab my iPad2 and BlackBerry to head into work.  On the way in I continued to check the morning news on my BlackBerry to find out the what was going on in my city besides the local elections.  Once at work I opened up my iPad2 to check out my daily alerts to see what was going on in the Tech community and to see if there was anything really neat happening.  Then I turned to my computer and sent a friend a link about the voting results.  To say the least things in the news and information industry have changes a whole lot over the past decade.  The real question now is how are they going to change over the next decade!

Many people have projected and predicted how the news industry will evolve - Newspapers will die out, news will go hyper-local, news will become more social, online video will rule the day.....but, what will come true, and what will just been seen as a fade when we look back.  I would like to think some of the predictions are not too hard to figure out if they will come true or not.  Newspapers have seen a steady decline over the past decade and have been scrambling for years to come up with new ways to compete, but I think everyone (even me) can see the end of Newspapers is near.  More and more people are preaching social this and social that and it seems like everyone belongs to a social network, so why not have news become more social?  Also, online video is huge and not to mention everywhere, so why wouldn't news become more online video centric?

All and all it seems the future of news is moving more online, social, and video centric everyday.  With more online news sites popping up, and with YouTube and Facebook being two of the biggest sites on the web, I think that we will soon see an online video social news movement!  Only time will tell if this is all true or if the these notions are just silly.  I for one believe that news will have to become more social and video centric and that is why at least with our online news site we are moving in this direction.  The fun part of actually seeing the next step with news is yet to come, and I for one cannot wait!

Your OurTown Hero,

Chris

OUR TOWN GOES TO THE UK

Our Town Media has announced the creation of its first Ourtown.com site outside of the United States. The www.ourtown.com/seafordeastsussex/ site serves a population of approximately 23,000 residents in the town located on the southern coast of England. Our Town Local Editor, Dennis Lewendon, a Seaford resident, will be bringing local news of Seaford Town to its residents and visitors.

"Whether in the U.S. or elsewhere around the world, people are essentially the same. They all want to know what is going on in their town, or village. OurTown will fill that gap left by other news sources as we expand our reach across the United States and through Europe during 2012," said Carol Meinhardt, OurTown COO.

Patch.com expanding...but at what cost?

Listeners of the World,

Traditional news had transformed over the past decade from local and national newspapers / magazines to online / hyper local and global news sites! With this transition local newspapers are dying out while the national papers are making huge cut backs and scrambling to get their news online. This has lead to many different online news sources that take a different approach to local news. Many are taking a hyper local approach to give their viewers true local news that won’t be covered by the bigger news sources. Because of this, sites like OurTown, Topix, Americantowns, Everyblock, and others have become very popular and are now trying to take over the whole hyper local space which most experts value in the billions!

Since there are so many different online news options in today’s world I decided to look over many of the sites to see how they are planning to take over the space, and one stood out from the rest…….Patch.com. Patch is an up incoming hyper local website that is now in about 24 states covering over 100 cites which seems very impressive, but how did they manage to accomplish this? Well from what I have read and research about Patch it is a interesting and bumpy ride…..so hang on!

Patch started as a small hyper local news start up in California founded by Tim Armstrong (Now CEO of AOL) which was sold to AOL in June of 2009 for $7M. Of course this was after Mr. Armstrong became the CEO of AOL (which gave him a nice early payday I might add). After the purchase AOL then decided to pour $50M into Patch that same year.

Then AOL went on a “buying spree” of online news sources like Techcrunch, and HuffingtonPost trying to strengthen their online news site – Patch.com. Once they purchased these sites they started having their articles appear on patch and then made Arianna Huffington the in charge to oversee Patch.com.

Now will all this money / purchases being poured and combined into Patch it is hard to say how one competes with them in this space, but you also have to ask – how long can they keep this up? The amount of money they are spending eclipses almost all of the other hyper local sites budgets combined! Many experts and Ex-Patch employees say the business model isn’t sustainable and that as of right now they can’t understand how they will recoup all this money they are pouring into it.

Patch boasts about their sales force of over 100 people to help sell advertising on their sites, but when you go to a Patch site…..you don’t see too much advertising on it! Also they boast about their great updated business directory that in reality leaves out a lot of newer small business and is obtained in a “not so upfront” way. I have talked many business owners and ex-directory employees from Patch and have learned about many unsavory techniques that they use to get the business information and pictures! I have also talked some individuals about their local editors and journalism staff who they call ruthless and disrespectful when it comes to not wanting to cooperate with giving them information on a story (which a lot of their articles aren’t news at all).

Overall Patch.com has a good strong base of local sites and viewers, but at the cost of over $100M! They don’t seem to be generating a lot of local ad sales and their stories are becoming less and less news breaking. Patch is in the lead for obtaining the online hyper local space, but at what cost…….

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

Everything Video......

Listeners of the World,

We have begin making steps toward our new goal of making OurTown.com more video based! The first step was to make our HTML island "News Worthy" meaning our local editors now have a way to embed videos and have them be seen on our homepage and in our RSS feed. This will help increase the visibility of these videos to search engines.

Our second step is creating a Video Island that will allow our local editors to show any type of video! Right now we have a YouTube island that allows our local editors to show YouTube videos, which will be replaced by our new Video Island. This island is currently underdevelopment and should be released soon.

Our third step is the creation of our OurTown Video pages. We are currently working on this and once it is finished we will have a main OurTown Video page which will have all the videos playing on OurTown.com. Plus each individual OurTown page will have its own Video Page that will show only the videos from that town. This should help increase the SEO on each of our town pages including OurTown.com as a whole!

We are also in the process of introducing editors to our new video creation tool (provided by vADz) which will help them create their very own news clips and video ads! Please check back for more updates about our progress with increasing video in all aspects of OurTown.

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

New Post!

Listeners of the World,

Wow.....it has been over a month since the last post for the OurTown blog! A lot has been going on around OurTown with the new site development, process of adding video to the site (vADz Video), process of adding towns in the UK, and more! We have been very busy and wanted to update everyone on OurTown and it's progress.

- The new site is taking a lot longer than planned due to many of the changes, the development of our new ad system and process. We are still focused on getting this site up ASAP and to make sure that it will do and have everything that our local editors need. We have our new look completed and will also have our new training material and schedule when the site is ready!

- We are now encouraging video on the site in a few different ways. We have always had a YouTube feature on the site to be able to add videos, and now we are in the process of adding another solution which will help you create your own teaser videos.......vADz Videos. This will allow our local editors to add their own videos that they created. Now that is just the first part, the second part is with the addition of video ads! We are making it so that you can use the vADz Video system to create video ads for your local businesses. This will create more interest in your page and also help with the local ad sales.

- We have been adding a lot of new great local editors as of late, but one that we will be adding is a little different from the rest! Starting this week we will be adding some towns for the UK to the OurTown site. We have seen the need to be able to expand to other countries and have been working on making the site ready to handle this change. We soon hope to have many towns not only in the US, but also in the UK!

These are just a few of the many projects, additions, and changes that are keeping us busier than ever! We will start having weekly and bi-weekly updates again to help keep everyone updated with everything OurTown, Hpyer local news, Online News, and Social News!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris