I first heard the word ‘hyperlocal’ around 20 years ago.
Not surprisingly, it was spoken by an American, Ralph Ingersoll III, who had recently shocked us all with his whirlwind takeover of the Birmingham Post & Mail and Coventry Evening Telegraph. No-one had even heard of him.
It was a crazy couple of years that ended in tears for Ralph and a management buyout for the rest of us. One of Ingersoll’s more daring wheezes was to shut a string of profitable free newspapers and replace them with 40-odd hyperlocal, hybrid freesheets – a tad bigger than A4 – for Birmingham’s local communities.
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