Buttry Sees Progress for Digital First’s ‘New Model’ for Community News

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Steve Buttry, the digital transformation editor at Digital First Media, began his career in community newspapers more than 40 years ago in Columbus, Ohio – as a teenage carrier. In the years since, he’s been a reporter, editor, and teacher of journalists around the world. These days, Buttry’s job is to complete the “print-to-digital transformation” of two slimmed-down “legacy” news media companies, Journal Register and MediaNews Group. To find out how it’s going, I put these questions to him…

Street Fight Daily: Mobile Ad Spend Jumps, Web Only Gets Physical

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.US Mobile Ad Spending Jumps to $4 Billion (eMarketer)… Once Proudly Web Only, Shopping Sites Hang Out Real Shingles (The New York Times)… Garmin Integrates Foursquare and Glympse with Mobile Apps for Non-Creepy Location-Sharing on the Go (The Next Web)…

Digital First’s Buttry: Turning Community Engagement Into Profit

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“The engagement is part of building the brand, and the better brand you have, the easier the sale is for your sales staff,” says Buttry. “And the better brand you have, the more you’re going to feed in traffic. The more you become a place to find everything in the community, you’re going to generate more traffic, which generates more revenue.”

Why Do We Check In?

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“I did not want to be mayor of my dentist’s office. Why did I even check in?” read a tweet posted last week by Digital First Media’s Steve Buttry. Buttry was echoing a thought that I’ve had a lot lately about my own habit of checking in to Foursquare: I don’t know exactly why I’m checking in, or what I get out of it — yet I do it anyway, usually several times per day.

Local Quotables: Steve Buttry, Jeff DeBalko, Eric Friedman and more…

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The best words about and around the hyperlocal industry. At the Street Fight Summit, the quote of the event came from Datasphere’s Gary Cowan. Elsewhere, John Byers cautioned on the long-term repercussions of working with Groupon and Yipit’s David Sinsky had some serious analysis on the company. Meanwhile, Journal Register’s Jim Brady and Steve Buttry both […]

Street Fight Daily: 10.25.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...

Hyperlocal task/errand site Zaarly has announced that it raised $14.1 million in financing, and that the company is gaining Meg Whitman as a board member. The site works by letting people post requests for an item or service, and then lets other people, businesses and companies bid to fulfill those needs. (New York Times/Bits)…

Stocks columnist Herb Greenberg looks at Groupon’s numbers, determining that the company is “technically insolvent.” (CNBC)…

Local Quotables: Susan Mernit, Steve Buttry, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, and more

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A weekly roundup of thoughts about and around the hyperlocal industry.

Susan Mernit chastises the ONA; a Groupon manager says businesses don’t understand their product; SimpleGeo’s Jeffrey Kalmikoff expresses doubts about Facebook’s new interface; and Hearsay Local’s Clara Shih talks about social networks in the organization. More:

Twitter Local: @MarissaMayer, @LisaWilliams, @PerryEvans, @RobCurley and more…

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This week on Twitter, Rob Curley notes that “innovative” doesn’t always drive readership; Closely’s Perry Evans calls Zagat “an aggregation model and methodology,” and Grapphic’s Michael Fives rolls his eyes at TechCrunch, AOL and HuffPo: It’s “like watching a bunch of spoiled children misbehave.” Read more from the hyperlocal twitterverse.