Google to Report on Your Neighborhood

Big Think reports that Google is planning on providing a "hyper-local" news card on its Google Now service.

Currently in internal beta test, the card will present what vice president Johanna Wright calls "very local, hyper-local news...[that] teaches me things about my neighborhood. For example, I found out Miss Mexico came to my son’s school, I saw that [the local] Chipotle was giving out burritos, and someone was stabbed in the park near my house."

I'll be paying attention to this development.  Living in a small town that's had its own daily newspaper for almost 200 years, my J-school interests lie outside who owns market behemoths like the Boston Globe or L.A. Times.

My local paper, like most its size, is mediocre-to-terrible. Sometimes there's just nothing going on to report. Sometimes the interests of the publisher cause them to leave out key details.  And local scandals just don't make it into print.  The big news of my post-high school years was that the superintendent of schools had affairs with several women in the school system.  Although everyone in town knew the reasons behind his resignation, the paper took pains to avoid the subject as much as possible.

But local papers like mine are similar to a soldier who plays dead on the battlefield. No one is paying attention to the tiny market it represents and so they've been relatively unharmed by the changes in the newspaper game. (Growing illiteracy and apathy among the rural lower class is another story.) They get by with road construction notices, city council meetings and school lunch menus--the type of information we like to have but will never be covered by the newsrooms of the metropolitan areas down the road.

There's definitely money to be made here, no matter how small; it may be interesting to peruse police reports of Milwaukee but it doesn't get me to work on time.  

Google's program won't usurp local papers anytime soon; as usual, they only collect and present information, not generate it.  In the future, I see local news moving towards crowdsourcing, if a better method than commenting or forums can be found. One full-time employee to curate and several full-time PR employees for all the local agencies combating "published" accusations of Satanic conspiracies and unhygienic food preparation.