Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame has a head-scratching post about hyperlocal news and its impact on the media. Here is how he concludes:
There's nothing new about this (it's a truism of the American newsroom that Paris, Texas counts for more than Paris, France), but it bears repeating. The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn't relate to our lives. I'll start reading my "local" newspaper again when it covers my block.
I say headscratching for a few reasons. First, it ignores the point that the world we are living in is vanishingly small -- what happens around the world is, arguably, more important today than it has been at any time in history. That's true -- and being willfully ignorant about what's happening is nuts. Secondly, as one of his commenters have noted, hyperlocal news is not really news, not really interesting and super hard to do. There's no economic model to support, and no interest even on the part of the most hard core citizen journalists to cover block by block. Finally, even assuming the coverage actually existed, we'd end up with the media equivalent of the four blind men and the elephant -- block by block coverage doesn't paint a holistic picture of the world.