Hyperlocal media in the future: my vision

Large touch screen monitors will become more widespread as prices drop, which would enable big breakthroughs in hyperlocal journalism

I have a vision for what I think hyperlocal media will look like in, say, 15 years. It could be much sooner, however with the recession, innovation has been pushed back considerably.

My vision involves large touch-screen monitors, push notifications, news feeds/RSS, augmented reality and metadata. Oh, it also involves news on the Web.

Please excuse me, as this will probably sound very pie-in-the-sky right now. But it’s only a matter of years before we’re seeing this technology – or something like it – realised and utlilised.

Here’s the scenario I’m envisioning:

You’re sitting in your home when suddenly you hear a beep. The beep you’re hearing is coming from the touch-screen monitor sitting in your kitchen (0r sitting room, or bedroom). The beep is a push notification sent to your screen. You approach the screen and see a geographic overlay of your community/state/country.

Touch the blinking icon and a new screen appears. It tells you what has happened within the area that you’re interested in monitoring. It will give you a headline and possibly a photo. If it’s something you’d like to know more about, you “click-thru” to the full story.

Once you’ve clicked through, you’re brought to an augmented reality viewing of the area in question. It shows you the address and all relevant information about the area that is legally available in public records. It also shows you the story in different mediums. If you want to watch a video of it, tap the video. Want to read the story? Tap away. There’s even a soundslide available. Tap, tap, tap.

The idea is you’re giving the reader the option of seeing the story in whichever way they want, and ensuring that they are finding out what’s happening in their community and areas of interest. You’re bringing the information to the user, but also asking them to define the parameters of delivery.

Like I said, very pie-in-the-sky sounding. But at the rate technology is evolving – iPhone to Kindle to Tablet – I suspect it’s not as far away as we might think.

Here’s how I think such media would be packaged by the news outlet:

Once a story is finished, the next step before sending into down the pipeline and to your customers/readers is to encode it with the relevant metadata. Find out exactly where the story is based. Encode the text, video and soundslide files with metadata of country, state, city, “tags” and latitude/longitude.

After it’s encoded, it’s sent down the pipeline and delivered to the end user. It shows up on their map as an icon if it’s within their pre-determined search parameters.

I don’t think I’m crazy. We’re not there yet, but we will be soon. Be prepared.

Filed under: Aggregation, design, newspaper websites, blogging, hyperlocalism, new media, newsapers, social media