A much needed and fascinating discussion about hyperlocal news keyed off an article in the Wall Street Journal about the Washington Post's LoudounExtra and also of Scott Karp's analysis of how the Washington Post covered a thunderstorm. Something te...

What amazes me is that someone like me, who lives in Loudoun County, participates in Loudoun politics and community affairs (even though I'm a Texan and have only lived here for a little more than a decade), and practically lives online, found out about LoudounExtra.com...today, while reading this post.

You'd think the WaPo folks would tell people about it or something, but it looks like managing the web site isn't something they put a lot of thought into.

As an example, I note from my radio buddy, Scott Fybush that WNBC-TV/4 in New York is trying just such a move;

The first sign of the reinvention of WNBC came earlier this spring, when the station rebranded its newscasts from "4HD" to "News 4 New York." In the next steps toward making WNBC a "local content center," NBC plans to rebrand its local website simply as "NBC New York," with the local news on the website and on Channel 4 soon to be joined by a 24-hour service known as "New York's Newschannel." (The "local content center" plans for WNBC's seventh-floor newsroom parallel the "content center" NBC built last year on the third floor of 30 Rock to consolidate NBC News and MSNBC operations.)

The new channel will be seen on a subchannel of WNBC-DT, presumably replacing what's now "4.4," a mixture of local news rebroadcasts and inexpensive syndicated fare. Eventually, it will also be visible on other platforms, including seatback TV screens in taxis and on the "NBC New York" website.

It will compete with two other 24-hour newschannels with longer histories in the market: Time Warner's city-oriented New York 1 and Cablevision's collection of regional News 12 services in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Long Island, Westchester, the Hudson Valley, New Jersey and Connecticut - and it will compete with those channels without adding any additional staff to the existing WNBC news team.

Instead, NBC management says they'll be extensively retraining current WNBC employees to contribute to the new 24-hour service, which will also likely use the first "one-man band" videographer/reporters in the company. (New York 1 pioneered the concept in the city when it launched back in 1992.)

If "New York's Newschannel" proves successful, NBC hopes to roll the concept out in its other local markets, including Philadelphia's WCAU.

I suppose this to be a decent measurement on the question of hyper-local coverage, when seperated from the paper media.