The Czech Republic’s PPF Group is preparing to launch a series of “connected cafes” in several cities across the country next month in an attempt to link journalists both physically and digitally with their reading public. The joint ventures – part coffee shop and part newsroom – are the latest experiment in the growing field of hyperlocal journalism, a shift in thinking about newspapers that seeks to capture niche audiences through extremely specific and relevant reporting. This project aims to bring the idea of responsive coverage and community feedback into the realms of the real time.
This move away from a mass market mentality, also hopes to appeal to advertisers and their ever shrinking budgets with the promise of speaking to clearly identifiable target demographics. Still, given the untested formula, the opposite may also be true – audiences may become too fragmented to reach in any truly meaningful way. As a result, the PPF Group plans to test the model on a small scale first.
The NY Times reports:
PPF is starting small, investing less than €10 million, or $13.4 million, in the project for now, Mr. Gallo said. It plans to begin publishing seven weekly newspapers and about 30 Web sites serving four distinct regions of the country next month, clustered around the four cities in which the “news cafes” will be situated: Olomouc, Usti, Teplice and Kromeriz. The cafes, Web sites and newspapers will operate under the name Nase Adresa, or “our address,” with the names of the local communities included for the publications.
In an attempt to give the endeavor a bit more legitimacy from the beginning, the PPF Group will be partnering with Google, who in lieu of investing in the enterprise, has offered its local staff to assist local journalists with better utilizing and integrating the web’s tools. Not surprisingly, much of this training will focus on Google’s own technologies – Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube – a chance for the Search Engine giant to impact one of the few countries it doesn’t have a leading share market share in.
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