Brian Timpone, the founder and CEO of Journatic, is a destroyer. And that’s a good thing because community journalism needs entrepreneurs who will clean out the stubbornly resistant vestiges of 20th century “best practices." Too much of community journalism is built on an outdated model where one reporter is the Ptolemaic center of the news-gathering universe....

Size matters when national advertisers look at hyperlocal sites, but not that much. That’s what I got from a phone talk with Bryan Quinn, vice president of publisher strategy & operations at Cox Digital Solutions. CDS — the combination of Cox acquisition Adify and Cox Cross Media in January 2011 – is the middleman between advertisers as big as Walmart and Target and their agencies and local digital sites of all varieties...

Hyperlocal sites shouldn't look at hard news as journalistic broccoli. The challenge is to serve up hard news appealingly – to connect it with each user’s gut-level self-interest. This means giving users the space to talk about their news enthusiasms. It’s not always enough to ask, “What do you think?” Sometimes a site has to offer a prompt...

Over the next few years, I think the word “consolidation” will end up being attached to more stories about hyperlocal than “doomed.” In Sacramento, the region’s hyperlocals have been very serious about consolidation since the creation of the Sacramento Local Online Advertising Network in December 2009...

After crashing and burning in Northern Virginia’s highly competitive hyperlocal space in 2009, it appears that the Washington Post is again looking for a way to get back into the game in its local markets. The big, signifying tea leaf is the Post’s appointment of John Temple as managing editor for local news...

Mobile is the commanding new digital experience. App-rich smartphones are rapidly transforming our daily lives, and it's become vital for publishers and media companies of all sizes to create mobile products that satisfy consumer demand. What does this all mean for hyperlocal news sites, which have largely been focused on perfecting the digital experience for the desktop? Amy Gahran, senior editor of Oakland Local, shares her insight...

Less than two weeks after Village Soup was abruptly shuttered, the print and digital mini-conglomerate of Midcoast Maine is being resurrected. The company's new owner, Reade Brower, who publishes Midcoast’s Free Press, praised the Village Soup publications, and said he wanted to return them to the public as intact as possible.

What Datasphere excels at is scaling, with superb technology — and, of course, finding that sweet spot between the aggregators and high-cost editorial operations. Is this the future of hyperlocal? The 50 million unique visitors to their TV stations’ community sites have provided a kind of answer...

Hyperlocal news sites often publish revealing stories about what makes their communities tick or that capture the uniqueness of their character. Can those stories – which routinely disappear into archives – find new life as e-books?

What’s needed is a survey that’s as thorough as Pew’s but which is confined to those communities with at least one credible independent site as well as a network site — like a Patch or Main Street Connect outlet — and at least one “legacy” (newspaper or local TV) site...