After months of hard work from all 15 members of the Local Fourth team, we’ve wrapped up our final Business Cookbook, Final Report and Presentation. Our Context Management System, Sourcerer, is up in prototype form.

And we want you to read, watch and use our work. Here’s where you can find everything:

- Business Cookbook: “Sustaining Hyperlocal News: An Approach to Studying Local Business Markets”

- Final Report: “Reimagining Hyperlocal News: Searching for a Sustainable Future”

- Final Presentation, which is archived at this link.

- Sourcerer.us: finally, swing by the Sourcerer prototype. Get a feel for what we’re doing. You’re going to like it, we think. The Context Management System can be found at Sourcerer.us. And we’d love your feedback.

Also, if anyone out there in any aspect of the media landscape wants to try out Sourcerer on their website, we’d love to help. Send a quick note to Rich Gordon here: richgor (at) northwestern.edu

It’s hard to believe it, but local business owners, as we found in talking with them, are very sensitive people.

Not the kind of sensitivity that makes you want to watch “The Notebook” on repeat, but a different kind: the anger they get when being “sold” an online advertisement.

About a month ago, a few members from the Local Fourth Business/Revenue team ventured into downtown Evanston, Ill., to chat with businesses about their advertising preferences.  At first, this exercise was designed to add to our research – we were looking for more information about advertiser needs, a major portion of our final report and presentation.

What we found was a lot of built up anger – anger toward online advertising. One local business owner was so distraught that we used the words “online banner ad” on our written survey that he almost refused to fill it out. After a minute of calming and consultation, he finally agreed.

Despite all this angst toward the idea of spending money on an “online banner ad,” there was something interesting we learned by accident through this survey. You see, one option we asked business owners to rank was named, “Full-page sponsorship ads.” At the time, we semi-stole the idea off the Evanston Chamber of Commerce, whom was selling a form of advertising themselves under a package labeled in a similar fashion. We thought we could mimic the idea – turn the conventions of an “online banner ad” into something a little larger, slightly more prominent on a website that gave the impression of being more important.  In essence, as we understood it, a “Full-page sponsorship page” was nothing more than a slightly exaggerated ”online banner ad.”   Yet, as our survey results showed, business owners loved this concept.

Sales can sometimes center around perceptions. Learning the connotations and meanings that business owners dislike about a certain style of advertising on the Web could mean a big difference in a sales approach for a hyperlocal publisher.  When we set out to conduct out survey that day, we had no idea that we were going to learn this type of information – that language counts when classifying advertising on the Web.

This just goes to show how important primary market and advertising research can be for a hyperlocal. Taking the time to conduct this sort of thing that open up ideas that could help lead to revenue generation.

It has become the focus of the remarks we are planning on making during our final presentation this Thursday evening (which, if you haven’t already heard, is taking place at the McCormick Tribune Center Forum on Northwestern’s Evanston campus at 5 p.m.): Sometimes finding a sustainable revenue-generating model in a hyperlocal space is about putting aside what you think you know, and learning a whole lot of little things you never knew about a market. Sometimes, as we surely found out, information you weren’t looking for will arise – and become increasingly valuable.

Main lesson: pay attention to how advertising sales are perceived to local businesses.  Perception can be everything at times, and creating a positive relationship with businesses can lead to a fruitful, long-term partnership.

Something both sides can profit from.

In a week, we — the Local Fourth team — will be making our final presentation in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum at Northwestern University’s Evanston campus.

It’s been a crazy several months and speaking for myself, I can remember the first few weeks of our project when we were coming up with concepts and ideas for our vision of the dissemination of hyperlocal news. I thought the 2010 Block by Block conference held at Loyola University near the end of September was a valuable event for us to go to. More than anything else, it gave us a first-hand look at how hyperlocal websites, in different markets throughout the nation, conduct their business on a day-to-day basis.

One of the main complaints about maintaining a site was figuring out to fund it, and that’s one of the things that the Local Fourth team concentrated on as we went about constructing a resource that could generate revenue. Another complaint at the Block by Block event brought up by was the issue of interactivity. Everyone knows about Facebook and Twitter, but the question became this — how do people use those social media tools efficiently to increase awareness about their sites and local communities?

By extension, what’s the best way to get everyone involved on a hyperlocal website and give them the community news that they’re looking for?

There were many more questions that were asked at Loyola, but I think the final presentation will offer a glimpse at some of the solutions we came up with when constructing our site.

On December 9, we’ll unveil our project to the public. After that, we’ll see if we’re on the right track or not.

When I first stepped foot into the classroom where I would be embarking on my final quarter as a graduate student at Medill, you could say I was a bit taken aback at the mission statement of my capstone course: solve hyperlocal news on the Web.

Whoa.

Not that my classmates and I weren’t smart enough or up to the challenge, but come on – making hyperlocal news “work” online has been a hot-button problem in newsrooms and journalism institutions for, at least, the last 20 years. We’re going to somehow derive the magic key to solve it, make it financially sustainable?

Perhaps more daunting was the experience my classmates and I had at Block By Block, a September local media summit that featured hundreds of local news entrepreneurs still searching for answers to making their site financially sustainable. Some of these local news junkies were successful (I interviewed the editor of the St. Louis Beacon, a site that operated under a $1 million budget last year), while others were, well, not so successful (one entrepreneur expressed making as little as $500 in revenue every six months).

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When we agree with something, it’s very natural to say, “oh yeah, I like that!” That phrase seems like something we all own, something that we all have a little stock in (like how all those Green Bay residents get a piece of the Packers, you know what I mean) when it’s said. But somehow, someway, Facebook has managed to take over those three words, and along with them, the thumbs up sign we all know, love, and hand out freely when we agree with something.

It’s nearly impossible to disassociate the “like” button with Facebook these days, and we’re feeling awfully strained just thinking of something similar to the phrase. In our project, we want to create a rating system, something that allows users to agree with statements and throw their support behind a particular answer to a topic. Sure, “agree” seems alright, but what sort of symbol goes with that?

We’ve tossed around a raised hand, a dog catching a frisbee, a smiley face, and the most recent, a flaming number (that indicates it’s a “burning question”). And I can totally get behind the “burning questions” idea, but during our usability testing our participants are seriously confused by the concept.

And I’m seriously steamed with the swashbuckling Mark Zuckerberg; we want our site to reflect community concerns, not look immediately like a Facebook offshoot. So I have to ask, hyper-local community, what other ways can you say “like?”

Can you believe it? Nearing mid-November, already? It’s hard to believe, but time is moving by quickly, and the Local Fourth Business/Revenue team is nearing completion of its main deliverable for the project: The Business “Cookbook.”

For the last two weeks, the Business/Revenue team has been cramping down, putting the final touches and design elements on our business findings and recommendations for the hyperlocal news entrepreneur.

Our “cookbook,” designed to provide a new way of thinking about making money in the hyperlocal space, takes a dive into some new ways of thinking: put audience first and foremost, not content, use academic research methods to more effectively assess your business environment and make better decisions, hire an ad sales manager, take traditional print advertising to the Web – static ads, instead of rotational banner ads, and much, much more.

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Things are starting to wind down with our project at Northwestern University, and it’s a little surreal that we’re in the final stages of conceptualizing a product that we’ll be presenting to the public in the next few weeks.

I remember when it was late September and I was feverishly, along with the help of Kevin Shalvey, trying to design a blog so that we could document the progress of our team as the days passed by. In a way, curating the Local Fourth blog has been a fun experience for me because as I’ve edited and read the submissions of the posts that my fellow team members wrote, I got a good sense of how the project was progressing by reading their thoughts. It was, and still is, fascinating.

Some of the material that’s been written by our group has been phenomenal and enlightening. Hyperlocal news is still evolving, and I think it’s pretty neat that we’re doing our part in trying to make it a more effective and efficient manner for people to get the information that they desire in their respective communities. We don’t have all the answers, but I do know that we have smart and talented people that are doing everything they can to figure things out.

Read some of the posts on this website and you’ll see what I mean.

A big portion of getting from step 1 to step…well, I’m not sure what number the final step will be, but you get the point. Let’s say in going from A to Z, one of the big steps is deciding a name for this project. We’e played around with “Project Querity,” but there have been some so-so responses to that name.

When demo-ing the site around town there have been some interesting suggestions, but it’s difficult to really encapsulate the entire project in just one phrase. On top of that, the elephant in the room is search engine optimization–we want to make our name catchy but we also want to come up in all the google searches.

Something we were relatively happy with is “search.it,” but we were immediately deterred from that name because .it isn’t very SEO-friendly. And once the issue of SEO came up then we started thinking about the content of the site and it’s lack of “SEO-ness.”

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As we move from paper prototyping to a live test site, one task we wrapped up this past week was examining our initial group of personas through the lens of the site’s functionality and developing user profiles.

I was initially worried that this process might be somewhat redundant with the creation of the personas themselves, but we were able to find some important new insights and identify blind spots. For example, while a number of our personas could easily be the ‘answerer’ in the Q&A aspect of our site, we couldn’t identify a single definite ‘asker.’ This has further helped us refine our ongoing discussion of balancing moderation and anonymity in the user experience, leading to what I believe are some near-final decisions on that process.

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