It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. And when he finds that wife, and she happens be pursuing her PhD in English, she’s sure to get him to read Jane Austen novels.
In part due to Courtney’s influence, I’ve been reading quite a bit of Austen in the past few months. I’ve finished “Pride & Prejudice” and “Emma” and probably will start “Sense & Sensibility” during my 20-some-hour flight to China in a couple months. I enjoy Austen’s writing, but something else has struck me about her novels: The fictional English countryside communities in which her novels are set would be tailor-made markets for a newspaper with a hyperlocal philosophy. They are small, the people all know each other, and most importantly, everybody is all up in everybody else’s business. In fact, I can’t think of a more perfect scenario in which hyperlocal would flourish.
Alas, when I look at most communities that are served by metro papers in the United States, I don’t see anything resembling the sort of communities found in Austen novels. People commute to work, often over great distances. There’s also less of a sense of belonging to the community in which one lives. In fact, I would argue that people are forming stronger connections with people and communities online — based on common interests — than the kind of connections they form with their neighbors based on geographic proximity. In short, I’m not as interested in news about my immediate neighbors as I am in news that impact my friends or groups of people who share my interests, no matter where they may reside.
I’m sure that there are still small towns in America that resemble those in Austen novels or the ones visited by Bill Bryson in his 1989 book, “The Lost Continent”, where the hyperlocal approach would serve the newspaper’s readership. But when it comes to large papers in metropolitan areas or even just cities that are more than tiny little burgs in the wilderness, the hyperlocal approach seems ill-suited for the lifestyle and interests of its readership. And according to this piece by Andrew Grant-Adamson, even the English countryside is changing into something where reader interests encompass much more than the immediate town in which they reside.