Planet media tends to throw up buzzwords like a heavy drinker with acute salmonella. ‘Social networking’, ‘disruption marketing’, ‘viral video’ – and now here comes another: ‘hyper local’. You’re likely to hear this phrase an awful lot, because if predictions are anything to go by, it describes the brave new frontier for broadcasting, the web and even print.

Rather like a balloon, the world’s various media outlets have inflated and expanded over the last twenty years or so. Sky ushered in global satellite TV in the 90s, the internet engulfed our lives in the early 21^st century and social websites linked us all to likeminded folk across the world in recent years. As the balloon stretched, regional television became more amorphous and considerably less relevant, ITV soaked up the provincial broadcasting companies (Granada, Central, HTV etc.) and, just this year, Global Media Group has swallowed the independent local radio network whole, rebranding every station Capital (Capital? That’s only London surely?) and duplicating its output across the nation.

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