A startling success story: CaliforniaWatch attracted readers to their exposé on seismically unsound UC Berkeley buildings by distributing fliers. On paper. To humans. In meatspace!
It’s a strategy so obvious (to anyone who lived pre-Internet) I’m surprised we don’t see it more often. Yes, of course, when you’re writing about an issue of local interest, you can connect directly to local people! That’s something that internet-marketing simply can’t do.
Of course, similar tactics have been tried: I’m thinking of The Daily Blog, an absolutely ridiculous project that combined the worst of newspapers with the worst of blogs to produce — believe it or not — a regular mass-distributed physical printout of a few webpages. It lasted for about as long as it takes for an electron to orbit a nucleus.
But that’s a case where physical presence simply doesn’t make sense. A person can occupy a geographic area like the UC Berkeley campus, so giving them physical media in that location and about that location is logical. But The Daily Blog was about a whole city as a gateway to the whole internet!
So, what’s the moral of all this?
There’s a lot of talk about hyperlocal online news these days. I like that. But as long as we’re being hyperlocal, it’s important that we don’t miss out on those unique opportunities for offline connections.
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I'm a writer and photographer in San Francisco, curious about how people can get away with writing all day while also being able to afford to buy groceries. 