Just how will hyperlocal make money and have good content at the same time?

Backfence tried to make money without rich, compelling content. The key is giving users quality content, which costs money to produce. You spend money to make money.

Can we honestly expect a journalism site to succeed long term without quality journalism? Sites like facebook thrive off of user-generated content because the technology is cutting edge, and it is focused around a niche.

Facebook started as an online version of the “facebooks” that freshmen students got when they matriculated each fall. The idea was to not only allow students to find out about each other, but to also allow them to connect with one another. It made the whole process of making friends and starting school easier.

It was a far better product than the print versions, and it rendered them instantly obsolete. Most hyperlocal sites pale in comparison to newspapers in terms of content and reasons to use them. That’s why companies can’t look at facebook and think that if they build a site with community-publishing tools, users will come.

You need more than just tools and technology.

Tom Grubisich over at The Online Journalism Review explains how he would have staffed Backfence with an estimated $1.6 million dollar budget from ad sales. The crux of his argument is that a hyperlocal site needs to pay people to make content. The idea that users will create content and dictate its direction is probably misguided at best.

Citizens are apart of the conversation now, but that doesn’t mean they are the conversation. They have full-time jobs, families and other engagements. Hyperlocal can’t expect them to carry the load.

The Backfence strategy – expecting its communities to deliver compelling content without any inspiration, mentoring or compensation – was doomed to fail. The result was stories and commentaries that rarely made anyone sit up and take notice. When Backfence announced its impending demise on its homepages on June 29, users, the few there were, paid almost no notice. Boring content meant weak traffic, and the most aggressive “feet-meet-the-street” ad staff can’t sell that.

Rather, we should expect citizens to augment the load and help expand our coverage and generate a meaningful conversation. This means having full-time staff to help produce and cultivate content.

Backfence expected its contributors to work for nothing. Its founders piously maintained that financial compensation was the last thing contributors wanted or expected. Many people donate their time to their church or congregation, neighborhood school or library and charitable organizations. But why should they work free so a for-profit company can justify its business model and rake in more money?

I propose that regular citizen contributors – working, say, 40 or 50 hours a month – be paid a $1,000 monthly stipend. That comes to $20 to $25 an hour – not a lot, but not an insulting amount, either. If you’re a retiree, a stay-at-home mom (or dad) or somebody looking to close a household budget gap, $1,000 a month for a few hours here, a few hours there, may seem like a pretty good deal.

Whether or not you want to go to the Grubisich’s model and pay a lot of citizen contributors or not, is one thing, but I believe paid contributors are a must. The Washington Post has a staff of writers producing daily content for LoudounExtra.com. I think that quality journalism is one reason that site has a good chance of succeeding.

The idea of paying a bunch of people $1,000 stipends to produce content every month is pretty solid idea. I might go a more traditional route and have a team of stringers. I also think any hyperlocal project needs at least a few full-time people to produce daily content.

What is clear, however, is that we can’t just produce a Web site with tools and expect random people to create meaningful journalism that is important to people’s lives.