I’m writing this pretty early in the morning; the majority of last evening was spent doing last-minute wedding organization.
It’s the kind of thing that drives home what’s important – the bit of news that’s hyper local. In our case, it’s the fact that Kerry and I are getting married at the end of the week.
In the case of immigrant communities, the idea of hyper-local news is a bit more fuzzy. Being that many immigrants send money home to their friends and family left behind, “hyper-local” could, in fact, refer to international news.
The immigrant community makes me think that maybe “hyper-local” has less to do with where something happens and more to do with who it happens to.
So maybe that’s part of why newspapers catering to immigrant communities, like Memphis’s La Prenza Latina or El Diaro La Prensa, based in New York City, are thriving.
That’s not all of it; to hear Brooke’s interview with executive editor Alberto Vourvoulias, a lot of it has to do with the fact that El Diario is still a newspaper printed on paper.
The fact that much immigrant labor is focused on manual labor means simply that they don’t have desk jobs – which means that they won’t be reading the paper’s Web site during idle moments at the desk – it’ll be in a break room, their paper rolled up and tucked into a back pocket.
The very physical media of El Diario means that it’s accessible to its target audience in a way that a Web-savvy paper simply cannot be right now. Never mind that my iPhone means that almost every newspaper important to me fits in my pocket – if that technology isn’t available to someone, they won’t be able to use it the same way.
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