Can Location Based Services Save Local Media?

A couple of follow ups on my musings from last week on location based services.

First of all, a bit thanks and kudos to Chrysanthe Tenentes of Outside.in for following up on my moaning and bitching. She agreed with me that Hoboken was no where near Yorktown Heights and pointed out that they are still building up coverage in areas outside of the more well-covered urban regions. Makes sense.

Which leads me to thought two – given the pretty lame state of the websites of most local media outlets (for shits and giggles, here’s the website of my town’s local rag), not to mention the websites maintained by school districts and local governments – will the increased use of location based services and the demand for more localized information put any pressure on these folks to improve their online presense? Does the fact that a write up on Yelp! carry more weight and brings in more business to a local diner than any amount of advertising in the local rag mean that said local rag is going to feel the pressure to move online where information can flow into more outlets?

I’d also like to see school calendars and event announcements flow into such services. I guess that’s asking alot.

Honestly I think it’s still the Westport Nows and other hyperlocal news sites that are going to win this race. They are already online, they already undestand the need to have their information in a format (XML, RSS, etc) that can be sucked up into tools like Radar and they already ‘get it.’ Which is why I’ve been thinking about finally using some of the local domains I’ve registered for good and not evil.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Yelp and TripAdvisor Help Business Thrive (socialmediatoday.com)
• FriendFeed puts location in a bit more context by auto-adding maps to the stream (venturebeat.com)
• Get Hyperlocal News via the Outside.in API (programmableweb.com)
• NBC and Outside.in match EveryBlock and NYTimes partnership (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

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