LoudounExtra.com has become hyperlocal journalism’s new hope.

The dazzling new site by The Washington Post is loaded with stuff to read and discover. It might be the site that finally puts the journalism in hyperlocal journalism.

But will LoudounExtra.com succeed where others have failed?

Only time will tell. Let’s take a loot at the good and bad of this exciting new venture.

The good:

You can clearly tell this site is made by the Post. It’s a looker. It’s very sleek and shares a lot of DNA with www.washingtonpost.com. The site manages to get a lot information on its homepage without feeling overdone. Many journalism sites suffer from “the wall,” as I like to call it. Those sites are just obtrusive walls of information that turn viewers away.

LoudounExtra is not that site. It doesn’t have an unnecessary side navigation bar with lots of useless links (I’m looking at you NY Times).

Most sites, www.washingtonpost.com included, use tiny photos and don’t play up their big stories, which I hate. Not this site. This site manages to use big photos to display major stories, but also find a way to display more than one using an innovative Flash interface.

But looks don’t make a hyperlocal site. This site has content and lotst of it. It’s not some pretend site that relies on citizen journalism to provide content. No, the staff spent months getting tons of quality information, and it is regularly updated with more journalism.

It has a guide with every restaurant in the county, complete with user reviews. It also has a database of all the places of worship in the, broken down by denomination, and a guide to schools in the county, broken down by type (high school, middle school, private, boarding, etc).

The best database is one dedicated to all the events happening in the county. It is, of course, searchable. Lots of newspaper put “events” online, but they usually do so in huge, hard-to-read, barely-searchable HTML files.

That’s so 1995. This site treats each event as a separate database file, making them easily searchable and displayable.

What are so special about these databases? Because they provide the kind of information that will make this site the center of people’s lives in Loudoun County. That’s what was missing with sites like Backfence.

Users of Backfence didn’t go to Backfence first if they needed to find something. They went trolling around Web 1.0 sites they found through Google, because Backfence wasn’t a portal to their lives. It relied heavily on the nebulous concept of citizen journalism, and not enough on real journalism or the kind of quality database content that people need in their lives.

Perhaps, the biggest good thing about the site is the staff of dedicated journalists producing real, quality journalism. Combining that kind of journalism with great database content is a winning combination.

There is a lot more I like, but I’ll keep this post relatively short.

LoudounExtra, however, missing one big component.

The bad:

The most immediate and startling omission is the lack of social networking. Vice President of Product Development Rob Curley promises big things in the months to come, but without robust social networking, I can’t see this site ever reaching its potential.

And it might fail because of the lack of it. Social networking is a very key component of hyperlocal. What makes local journalism local is the connection it makes. Social networking is the king of making connections.

Perhaps, one of those big features Curely is promising is social networking. He does promise an innovative way of doing citizen content. Will it just be a new way of doing community publishing or will it actually add something to the conversation? And will this community publishing truly harness social networking?

That’s the big question, because I personally would not make a hyperlocal journalism site without hyper-good social networking. LoudounExtra appears devoid of social networking.

For a 1.0 release, LoudounExtra is one heck of a good site. Curley promises much more to come in the months ahead. I can’t wait to see what they have in store, and then eventually I’d like to see the metrics on it.

If the Post team can add social networking and do community publishing in a meaningful way, I’m betting this site will succeed.

It already has quality content and real journalism. If I were a Loudoun resident, I’d come to this site firs to find out what was going on. But will the site add that hyperlocal touch?

I hope so.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Mainstream Media, State of journalism, Web development, new media journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.