Street Fight’s April Theme: Local Commerce in the Time of Coronavirus

This post is the latest in our “Commerce and Coronavirus” series. It will be an editorial focus for the month of April, and you can see the rest of the series here. 

Once per month during a weekly editorial call, Street Fight editors discuss the next month’s focus. You may have noticed themes that persist throughout each month, usually reflective of timely or foundational local commerce topics. We still cover major industry happenings, but these themes help structure the editorial flow.

Last week when doing this monthly exercise, we all looked at each other (remotely of course) with a sort of sarcastic shrug that conveyed the no-brainer agreement of what the topic has to be. Covid-19 is on everyone’s mind: It wouldn’t feel right to dedicate April’s theme to, say, voice search or any other tentpole topic in our roster.

So it was decided. We’ll devote coverage this month to the virus’ continued outbreak and its effect on local business. Of course, the airwaves and ether are already filled with pandemic coverage, and we won’t look to compete with that. Rather, we’ll be writing specifically about the crisis’ impact on local commerce, marketing, and related subjects.

In fact, we’ve already gotten started. Our March theme of reputation management barely got off the ground before we and many of our contributors came to the realization that it didn’t really feel right to talk about anything other than Covid-19. Don’t worry, we’ll give reputation management an encore performance later in the year.

Outbreak coverage so far has included things like Damian Rollison’s look at what Google, Yelp, and others are doing to help local businesses communicate with their customers. It also includes a guide, and related webinar, that Street Fight’s parent company Brandify* has published for local businesses to use as a tactical reference guide.

More than usual, much of what we publish this month will be along these lines. In other words, we’ll lean toward lots of journalism focused on how businesses and consumers in the local space can weather the storm. Tactical content is what is needed right now, and it’s what local businesses — and those serving them with digital marketing software and services — likewise need.

Our promise to you is to maintain the reportorial rigor and journalistic integrity that you’ve come to know in these pages. There’s lots of misinformation out there in normal times. But the stakes are obviously high now, so we will reinforce our own best practices as a journalistic entity that vets published content carefully.

We’ll label posts on this topic so you can look out for them (see the preface and links at the opening of this article). We’ll also give you the chance to see them all at once. This is part of an ongoing editorial strategy aimed at helping you find our most pertinent content across monthly themes.

Reach out to us with suggestions for monthly themes, opportunities to contribute, and to amplify your brand messaging alongside this thematic coverage. On that note, we’re excited to also announce that we’ve launched the latest version of our media kit. Check it out, and come be part of our narrative.

*Brandify is Street Fight’s parent company, though Street Fight maintains editorial independence.