If you've been watching the online journalism scene, you probably know that Backfence has been closing down one subsite, then another... and now they're calling it quits. The website just hasn't done well enough to keep it open.
It seemed like a good idea, so why did Backfence fail? One would assume that a site dedicated to your neighborhood would be a great thing. Backfence had such things as local crime stats and user-contributed photos. Wow, what a great resource for home-shopping or just keeping up with your area! What happened? Was it a failure to advertise correctly? What's going on?
The whole closure of Backfence got me thinking about the terms I had stapled to my forehead in college. Things like "global village." The digital revolution has mad the rest of the world accessible in a way new seen before. I expect to be able to get news from the UK, Japan... anywhere that I can, as long as the RSS feed that eventually hits my reader is in English. Are we too used to having the world at our fingertips? Is a “hyperlocal” site just too focused for the modern reader?
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