Following up on my column from last week, here are more unvarnished thoughts from "indie" hyperlocal editors and publishers I’ve been talking to about sustainability (a word, by the way, that sets the teeth of some of these entrepreneurial journalists on edge)...

We know that there exist a great number of businesses in our local communities that service a variety of needs at their clients’ homes or business locations. Aside from specialized services like Angie’s List and Service Magic, there are few local search outlets that serve potential clients or service providers well in terms of their ability to connect a need with the appropriate provider...

Over the past few years I've done some axe-grinding about the lack of location targeting in mobile advertising — and the fact that desktop ad strategies have largely been ported over to the small screen, particularly among large brands and agencies. But in recent months we've started to see some of those habits break down, beginning with newer companies in mobile that don't have to "unlearn" anything to get there...

In mid-sized cities across America for nearly 100 years, the daily newspaper was the purveyor of enterprise journalism, the opinion maker and a focal point for advertising. In many cities they were monopolies: they set the pricing for advertising, they promoted and punished political officials, and they decided the news cycle every day. But as digital has overtaken American life, mid-sized American newspapers have not kept pace...

In this week's episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan talk about Shazam's background tagging; Domino’s delivers Pizza-smelling DVDs; UberMedia changes the rules in targeted ads with UberAds; LevelUp partners with NCR; The importance of customer feedback and engagement plus special guest Martin Shen, co-founder of UpOut...

"Content remains king. So long as you don't lose sight of that, much of the rest falls into place," said Sheepshead Bites editor and publisher Ned Berke. "But, content doesn't pay the bills, so we're always looking at ways to improve the services we offer to merchant partners and other revenue opportunities..."

Local media companies need to do something to protect their digital sales assets or run the risk of losing them to pureplay web companies, according to a new report from Borrell Associates. Pureplays offer starting salaries in the range of $12,500 per year more than their nearest competitors, the local TV stations. The gap between starting pureplay sales people and those who work for newspapers is an incredible $21,000 more...

FiveStars and Canadian media giant Rogers Communications have launched a new local customer loyalty service called Vicinity, which represents the California-based company's first foray into international markets....

We need to find a way to attach revenue-producing messages to videos, so that the Web can do its thing without hurting the incentive for local media companies to create such videos in the first place. And I'm not talking about attaching 30-second prerolls. It can be done, and we need to talk about it. The Web is not TV...

When we talk about hyperlocal, it's usually about taking content and advertising down to the neighborhood (and sub-neighborhood) level. But it's possible to go a bit deeper than that, and I think there is still a lot of work to be done around combining local content and advertising with people's interests...