Image by Minh Uong/The New York Times.

Hyperlocal news is as much as a buzz phrase for those in news media today as anything else — yes, even social media.

But as these things happen, no real definition seems to hit at what we’re talking about, and I was surprised to not be able to easily find someone who tried to give one.

So, expecting some comments to show where I missed one or simply critiquing my own, I humbly submit one, if only for my own understanding.

• hyperlocal news (n): information gathering about a geographically-specific community that is part or was once part of a broader coverage area or focus.

So here’s what I mean by that. The hyperlocal movement is encapsulating some pretty broad, disparate agendas, from (1) citizen journalists covering their neighborhoods or towns of just a few thousand people or even fewer through to (2) media entrepreneurs who are trying to create news-gathering organizations covering as many as a few hundred thousand people in a specific geographic place — or, you know, data assembled by a computer.

What I think they have in common is the fracturing from or refocusing of an existing coverage area. Maybe a newspaper is struggling to report on a portion of its long-held coverage area with a smaller staff or one has entirely given up a now too-large readership base as too few of them are paying for that news.

In each case, someone is seeing a need for more news and finding value in making in narrower. Whether that blog or news site is covering a part of a city that isn’t getting the same coverage from the big daily newspaper or a small town that doesn’t get much attention from a regional news source, it doesn’t really matter, what is meaningful to me is that someone narrowed a coverage area to create a new product with a more specified audience.

While there’s value in thinking of this coverage as being simply that which is narrow in focus to be very often uninteresting for anyone unaffiliated to the specific community, it doesn’t differentiate enough from small town newspapers. That’s local news. Hyperlocal is the further fracture of even local news.

I’ll add that I believe hyperlocal is exclusively the domain of geography. While a site covering knitters in Philadelphia certainly fractures it audience, it doesn’t fracture it by geography. Now, a blog handling community events following knitters in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of northwest Philadelphia would, in my opinion, count, if only because of the neighborhood divide and not the knitting.

I don’t think profit or motivation much matters just yet at this stage of the form’s development. The citizen journalist blogging about his neighborhood to the professional media entrepreneur who is building a business around an underserved rural county can be working in the hyperlocal field by my sight.

Now, the argument can be made that anything is fracturing broader coverage. Domestic news is more focused than international news. Citywide news is smaller than the national wire. It simply becomes a question of intentions. If it’s a Web product that is recreating a printed or other news source, then I don’t think it’s really at its heart hyperlocal.

If you’re narrowing the focus to improve upon other coverage, then hyperlocal we have.

-30-

So  — in fewer words, I hope — what is your definition of hyperlocal news? Where are some other good definitions

Image courtesy of N.Y Times