Not to make too much of The Wall Street Journal story calling The Washington Post’s LoudounExtra a “flop,” — the recent mini-backlash against Curleyism that no doubt prompted the story is in many ways more interesting than the story itself, after all — but it does provide a convenient excuse for me to ramble on again about my view of what local truly means.

Scott Karp, a Loudoun County resident, put it best last summer in this post: Washington Post’s LoudounExtra.com Isn’t Yet Hyperlocal Enough. (Yes, I know I promised never to say or type the dreaded and meaningless h-word again, but I’m temporarily suspending that policy for the duration of this post.) Specifically:

… hyperlocal is most meaningful at community level — even the county level is too big. … Loudoun County includes extremely diverse areas, including the highly developed zone on Route 7 east of Lessburg, the major city (where I live), and the rural western areas that border on West Virginia. In fact, Eastern vs. Western Loudoun is a major divide on issues of development, schools, transportation, etc. But even within the east of Leesburg corridor, it segments further — down to the level of individual subdivision home owners associations (you can’t escape HOAs around here). News of what is happening in other HOA communities is typically of tangential interest for me at best.

Or, as my boss said when LoudounExtra was unveiled, “If a county is hyperlocal than we’ve been hyperlocal for 90 years.” Which is not to say that I don’t like the site, and especially not to say that I was rooting against it or that I read the WSJ story with even a hint of schadenfreude. Rather, I just never thought it was anything more than a generally attractive, well-functioning newspaper site built on a good platform. Certainly nothing revolutionary or particularly local.

Here’s Loudoun County, outlined in green, with its seven incorporated towns highlighted in light blue:

If “local is people,” as Jeff Jarvis said, then do people really live in a county this large? To the extent that a sense of community as we traditionally think of it still exists in a physical sense at all, surely it’s not going to be found in any meaningful way at the county or even municipal level. And whether that traditional sense of community ever really existed at all, surely the selfish factors that most definitely do exist and motivate us, such as home prices and school test scores, are most relevant at only one geographic level, aside from one’s own home, anyway: Neighborhoods. Real neighborhoods, not ZIP codes or anything similarly huge and meaningless.

Here’s what I call local, an individual neighborhood in the Loudoun County town of Purcellville:

And that’s exactly the level of detail we’ll be targeting down our way with Backyard Post. Say, want to read more of my thoughts on neighborhoods? I mean, who wouldn’t, right? Then have a look at these old posts:

• Introducing Backyard Post: Real-world neighborhoods as the foundation for a reappraisal of what a local newspaper should be
• Justifying the big investment, step by step
• Neighborhood boundaries: How small is too small?