Normally I don’t think twice about ordering online, but lately I’ve noticed a domino chain of stores closing in my town, Haddonfield. Last week, I quietly resolved to make 2012 the year I actually try to shop local.

It’s hard, of course, given that nearly everything we’re inclined to buy these days is available via iTunes or Amazon, but still: Something like the Bob Duali baby jogger stroller we can easily find in town. And sure enough, the Haddonfield Running Company had exactly the right model — only for about $150 more than the REI price.

Just for the heck of it, I walked in today with a printout from the REI site and asked if they would price match. “We can do that, sure.” No argument at all. They thanked me for giving the local mom-and-pop shop a shot.

Up until now I’ve never tried this anywhere but a know price-matching retailer (e.g. Buy Buy Baby), but after that happy-making experience, I may just have to walk into every ol’ store in town with a printout — if not a SnipSnap screenshot.

Born: 11/11/11
9:24pm
7 lbs 12 oz

Very proud of mother and son for sticking the numerologically awesome birth date.

Long live my son.

When we made the decision this week to shutter InJersey.com — a network of hyperlocal sites across the garden state that I helped build, nurture, and raise like a child — my biggest fear was that the effort would be branded a failure. In the age of Twitter, I was braced for the #epicfail hashtag. It came instead via Slate, in the form of a Jack Shafer missive, where he lumped my baby in as yet another vote of no-confidence in a “hyperloco” business model:

“The hyperlocal cemetery—where Bayosphere; the Washington Post’s LoudounExtra; Allbritton’s TBD; Backfence; and the New York Times’ New Jersey experiment, “The Local” are taking the dirt nap—got a new tenant today, as Gannett folded hyperlocal venture InJersey.”

The truth is that my colleagues and I viewed InJersey as a hugely successful experiment. Lest that sound like empty spin, here are the facts: We launched two years ago on a shoestring budget, and grew to 17 town blogs, 2,259 members, and 90 community contributors. Though we were never able to afford a full-time staff, we recruited site editors from the stable of reporters across the Gannett New Jersey newspapers — the Asbury Park Press, Home News Tribune, Courier News, Daily Record, Courier-Post, and The Daily Journal — who built up a tremendous online community. Some town sites, such as Freehold InJersey, earned as many as 65,000 pageviews and 47,000 unique users in a month. We sold sponsorships onto the town sites, and advertisers were thrilled with the response. We were profitable.

Let me repeat that: We were profitable.

But, alas, we never generated enough revenue to pay for a full time reporting (or sales) staff, and given the contractions of the newspapers (including a particularly tough round of layoffs last week), we couldn’t sustain the effort.

Still, as I said in my parting post on InJersey, even though we decided to suspend publishing, we did so knowing full well that the larger hyperlocal movement that we belonged to is as vibrant and innovative as ever. I’d hate for this act of infanticide to be minimized into a footnote on the wikipedia “hyperlocal” page. And so I want to share with you some of the major lessons I learned from InJersey.

1. Build Cheaply. Shortly after launching, Jeff Jarvis asked me to speak about the tools needed to launch a hyperlocal site at his New Business Models for News conference (or as I liked to call it, “HyperCamp”). I told the audience there that anyone can launch a killer community site for a few thousand dollars. Most can and do spend next to nothing. To drive home this point, I compared the budget to build InJersey ($3,720) with the cost of the movie “Paranormal Activity” ($11,000). It can be done.

We used WordPress for our CMS and BuddyPress for messaging, community registration, collaboration, and more. TribLocal uses much the same approach with their network. I have tremendous admiration for the kind of custom CMS that Patch has engineered — I’ve seen it; it’s impressive — but this doesn’t yield much of an advantage, IMHO. As hyperlocal swami Mark Potts says “It’s not about technology, it’s not about journalism, it’s not about whizbang Web 2.0 features. It’s about bringing community members together to share what they know about what’s going on around town.”

2. Recruit Via Twitter. I’m still so thankful for the Twitter DM gods for sending me Colleen Curry. She contacted me out of the blue, back when I was putting the finishing touches on our first WordPress theme, asking if we needed any writers. Luckily, we were able to bring her on to not only cover the blog, but also as a reporter for the Asbury Park Press, and she’s been an animal ever since — covering town hall, school boards, breaking news, dangerous intersections, and even stray turkeys. (Story of her hiring, in her words.) Her Freehold site was our top performing hyperlocal. At the same time we shuttered InJersey, I’m proud to say she was promoted to become USA Today’s New Jersey correspondent (#silverlining!).

3. Partner with Everyone. This may sound obvious, but I’m still surprised at how many hyperlocal sites start off all on their lonesome. We actively reached out to other startups (SeeClickFix, Outside.In, PaperG), local groups (United Way, Rotary, Libraries), and residents (liberals, conservatives, high-schoolers, old timers).

What made our approach to hyperlocal different than others (at least when we launched) was that we offered open registration and the ability for anyone to publish. Yes, we had our fair share of off-the-wall and inflammatory posts, but we took them down, contacted the contributor, and coached them on how to revise. It wasn’t a perfect system, but there was a great deal less friction than the Times’s “The Local” faced by editing every contributor’s post via email. We’d hoped to have 50% of our posts generated by the community, and while we only got half-way there, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

4. Local Advertisers Won’t Self Serve (but they will support local coverage). Like so many digital startups, we’d hoped that tools like PaperG’s Flyerboard (also looked at AdReady and AdTaily) would give advertisers the tools to easily build, schedule, and purchase their ads all by themselves. Yeah, didn’t happen. That said, there was definitely an appetite among local advertisers to support the kind of reporting and coverage we were providing. Still loved using Flyerboard, we just had to sell them, create the ads, and schedule it all ourselves.

5. Maps are eye candy. No more, no less. We kind of fell in love with Patch’s first map treatment on their homepage. So much so that we built a WordPress plugin to ape it. Only when we went live did we realize nobody was clicking on it. Next we tried Outside.In‘s full-page maps and widgets, which were even cooler — they automatically tagged our content with geo-locations based on contextual clues. Amazing magic trick. Alas, nobody clicked on them either.

Original Patch Map

InJersey's original map widget

(I suspect that the value of geo-tagging content and location will grow as we find new ways to integrate it with a mobile experience — e.g. presenting you with news and deals based on where you’re standing at that moment. Now that Outside.In is a part of AOL/Patch, I’m sure their technology will be put to good use.)

6. Aggregation and syndication are a smoke screen. During a previous round of layoffs, we attempted to automate the posting of content to some of our sites in Morris County. The idea being to aggregate other blogs and syndicate stories from dailyrecord.com, the sister newspaper site. It was almost immediately apparent that we’d ripped the soul out of the sites, and they quickly became ghost towns. Sure, they had “content” — and thanks to SEO a trickle of traffic — but not a whole lot of living, breathing residents.

7. Display advertising isn’t enough. We simply didn’t see enough local advertising to ever make our sites totally self-sufficient on display dollars. Howard Owens, prepare your flamethrower. I know that he claims to be able to generate upwards of $100-$150k per year on local advertising in The Batavian, and if this is true, my hat is off to him. But most sites are going to need to great creative, and there are plenty of other revenue streams that hyperlocals can employ. Local-local Daily Deals is one idea that has, of course, been discussed. Also promising: The sort of conference that NewWest.net operates; classes like the kind that we co-hosted with the Citizens Campaign; and commercial businesses like Brownstoner’s Brooklyn Flea. In fact, one of the most promising side-businesses just might be news cafes. Which brings us to …

Freehold InJersey "bureau" in Zebu Forno coffee shop

8. Coffee shops are a natural hyperlocal nexus. Many hyperlocal editors work out of Starbucks and neighborhood joints already, but the aforementioned Colleen Curry took the bold step of opening up a bureau in Zebu Forno in Freehold. Alright, it was really just a computer set up with a “The Journalist Is In” sign atop it. But it proved to be a brilliant way to raise awareness of the site and a place to recruit contributors and interview subjects. We didn’t recruit as many folks as we would have liked, but there’s little doubt it raised our profile in town. The Winnipeg Free Press was so inspired by it — and other similar initiatives — that they opened up their own News Cafe this year. Even though some have tried and failed at this model, like Nase Adresa (“Our Address”) in Czech Republic, they never went so far as to actually merge their newsrooms with their cafes.

9. Host the conversation on Facebook. If I could do it all over again, InJersey’s comments, login, and social features would all be rebuilt on Facebook plugins. That’s not to say you should make the drastic move of ditching your website, like Rockville Central. But there’s no need to build your own social network, as we foolishly attempted.

10. Live in the town. File this under “do as we say, not as we do.” For the most part our reporters didn’t live in the towns they covered. Patch, on the other hand, makes it a requirement that you live where you report. Patch’s way is better.

Back when I was prototyping the site in the summer of 2009 with my colleague, Whitney Rhodes (now at Patch), I took great inspiration from Mark Potts’s post-mortem on Backfence (a site whose cemetery I’d be honored to share). His insights guided us in how we approached the site — both from an editorial and community-building standpoint. I hope this will do the same for future hyperlocal entrepreneurs. If we must dub such sites as failures, I just hope we can also see things as Henry Ford did: “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

A trailer for Caroline’s 1-year birthday:

Throughout the day I also took a bunch of photos and videos with my new iPhone 4. Mostly I was just trying to get the hang of the device’s tap-to-focus function. When I got home, though, I decided to give the new iMovie for iPhone app a whirl. Until now it’d seemed kinda impossible to me that you could actually do any real video editing on a cell phone. But boy was I wrong. Not only was the app infinitely easier to use that the iMovie desktop app (or any video editing software, for that matter), but it was just as powerful. You can add titles, Ken Burns effects, a musical store, and even transitions. It’s unbelievable. The above clip took me all of 10 minutes to edit (ok, 15, if you factor in the extra 5 min to recut the thing, after Ana complained about some bathing suit pictures of her that were initially included.)

Best of all, you can upload your video straight to YouTube directly from the phone. The only catch is that if you do upload from the phone, it degrades the video quality. So if you want the full HD clip (which I did), you still have to copy the video from your phone to the computer, then upload via the web. If Apple can figure out how to allow HD uploading right from the phone, this may well inspire a massive boom in the amount of quality, edited mobile video. I for one will be doing my part. At least, until all my family and friends tell me to quit it with the home-movie insanity.

The book was published through Blurb, the same service I used to create “My Father and Other Manns: Volume 2″ last year. (It’s just about the best service for self-publishing that I’ve come accross, though for small orders of only 2 or 3 books, it can be kinda pricey.)

As anyone who knows Caroline is well aware, she’s just bonkers for ceiling fans. No matter what room or what house she’s in, if she lies on her back and sees a ceiling fan overhead, it makes her downright giddy. The book is my attempt to tell the story of how all her ceiling fans came to be.

But really, it’s just my way of telling my wife and daughter how madly in love with both of them I am.

I’ve been working on MU for a long time, ever since I started blogging at LoHud and helping to administer the blogs there. And while I’m about as big a WordPress fanatic as you’ll find in the newspaper business, few of my colleages (much less family and friends) have an interest in the nitty gritty of how the blogs work.

That said, I wanted to post about MU — and specifically, the WPMU DEV Premium site — today for two reasons:

1. There’s a contest involved, and I’m a sucker for contests

2. There’s been a debate raging for the last couple weeks over on wpmu.org that is really intriguing, and I wanted to give my $.02 here

First, the contest:

WPMU DEV Premium is a coalition of developers who have banded together to create plugins, themes, and other enhancements to MU (the multi-blog version of WordPress) for profit. That last part is key. Whereas most of the open-source WordPress community develops additional features for the blog software for free, WPMU DEV Premium has gone an entirely different route. Their site has a paywall and charges a hefty subscription fee ($79 a month; $419 for the year) to get access.

Now, I’ve been salivating over some of the plugins listed on the site for a year or so. The kind of features they’ve built for MU are fantastic, and often when I go searching for a plugin, theirs are the first I find. A few examples of ones I’d love to use:

• Set Blog Description on Creation: Simple, yet something that would be totally useful to an admin like me, who seems to set up new blogs by the dozen.
• Terms of Service: Something I’ve been meaning to add to our themes for ages. This would be an even simpler fix.
• Blog Activity and User Activity: I do these blog reports from time to time, where I try to tally up how many posts different bloggers have created. It’s a huge, monster pain. I’m literally going through counting by hand. Both these plugins would be huge time savers.
• Global Posts: This is an example of a plugin that I have (I think), but in an earlier version. I’m not 100%, but I believe this is an update of ITDamager’s global posts plugin, which you can still find floating around the web. It’s a critical piece of code that we use to publish all our staff blogs to the newspaper homepages. But, again, I don’t think it’s been updated to the current version of WP in ages.

OK, so I’d love to have all these. Still, every time I get to that “Join” screen on WPMU DEV Premium, I stop in my tracks. Much as I’d like to take advantage of all these plugins, I can’t pull the trigger.

Why? Well, I’m cheap. There’s that.

There’s also the fact that, as alluded to above, a lot of the plugins are seemingly updates or enhancements to other free versions.

But most of all, it’s the frustration I have that wpmu.org has essentially become the biggest and best repository of code for an open-source software, yet it’s not a fully open-source site itself. Further, I’ve had some bad experience with joining for-profit WordPress subscription sites, only to find out that the themes (*cough* Elegant Themes) or plugins (*cought OIO *) don’t work on MU. And those were both way less expensive in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, if given an account with WPMU DEV Premium, I’d be psyched. In fact, that’s part of the reason I’m writing this, as an entry in their current membership contest.

I realize that by speaking frankly like this I may well be hurting my submission. Still, given the debate that’s cropped up on the wpmu.org site recently — where the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, threw down with the folks at the for-profit WPMU DEV Premium — it’s hard to not be opinionated.

Which brings me to #2:

And this, my friends, is where things get complicated. See, despite all my frustrations with WPMU DEV Premium, when you think about it, the whole WordPress experiment is not all that different from what’s going on with the newspaper industry.

Say wha? Let me explain.

Just as everyone in my industry is working like mad to produce good daily papers and up-to-the-minute websites, we can’t seem to find any way to monetize our businesses online. We’re trying hard, believe me, but it’s a huge challenge. Likewise, WordPress and the developers who work on it have created one of the best open-source softwares on the web, yet few are getting paid commensurate with the time they’ve invested.

In other words, WPMU DEV Premium is sort of like those rogue newspapers that, despite just about everyone’s distaste for pay news sites, decided to throw up a paywall anyway. And the bitch of it is: People are still using them. In fact, a lot of MU developers have flocked to their site.

When you look at the news analogy, they’re sort of like the Wall Street Journal of WP development. (Incidentally, the WSJ does use WordPress.)

Sure, I might not ever subscribe to the Journal’s website, but you can be damn sure that a lot of business people who make their living off the paper do — just as the hardcore MU developers are willing to fork over for DEV Premium.

I completely sympathize with Mullenweg’s position; as the founder of this open-source project, it must be very difficult to see such a big group of developers not obeying the same code of ethics.

That said, everyone has to make a living — even reporters and developers.

I’m not sure that paywall sites are always the solution, but in the case of newspapers and MU, it appears to be one of our best (and only) options.

There’s a second videos, in fact, just for the doubters.