Do Datasphere’s 50M UVs Make It a Model for Hyperlocal Scale?
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…
DataSphere Lands $8 Million in Additional Funding
DataSphere Technologies has raised $8 million in investor financing to continue growing its business, which creates and maintains community websites for TV stations owned by Gannett, Meredith, and other major “legacy” media companies. The company’s 1,900 community and neighborhood sites now reach 50 million unique visitors monthly…
Jane Stevens: The ‘Revolution’ of Social Media and Local News
We know that news is being transformed by social media — the Facebook or Twitter effect, for short — but do we really understand that what’s happening, especially at the local level, can be, and maybe should be, a revolution? I borrow that potent description from journalist Jane Stevens, whom I recently caught up with to talk about how social media is transforming local…
Big Picture Stories Make Hyperlocals More Valuable
Hyperlocals do a great job at finding and generating news. But are enough of them putting government performance to the test? Given the amount of data available to measure performance, these stories should be resonating louder and more insistently than ever in this deep, stubborn recession…
How Is Citizen Journalism Playing Out Today?
Citizen journalism has propelled hundreds of hyperlocal news sites into existence. In the middle of the last decade, CitJ, particularly at the community level, was the hot topic in new media. Journalism’s thinkers saw it as a necessary and overdue reinvention of news (see Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, among others). So how is it actually playing out today — on the ground? To find out, I asked publishers and editors who have been part of the hyperlocal phenomenon.
Selected Directory of Hyperlocal Publications in NYC
PUBLICATION CATEGORY M.O. Bay Ridge Journal Neighborhood. Heavy on press releases and second-hand crime stories. Bensonhurst Bean Neighborhood. Recently created by Ned Berke, founder/editor/publisher of SheepsheadBites, site relies heavily on Huffington Post-style re-purposing of content originated by other publications. Bikeblog Specialty site. Founder Michael Green, a film maker who sees the bike as “humankind’s greatest […]
In Jefferson’s Hometown, a Hyperlocal Focuses on Digital Democracy
Brian Wheeler is executive director of Charlottesville Tomorrow, a thriving nonprofit hyperlocal in Virginia that focuses on land use and other civic issues that are key to protecting the character of the community that was the home of Thomas Jefferson. We talked to Wheeler about his unusual definition of user engagement, and how he’s working to take it to a new level…
After Shuttering, Village Soup Serves Up a Living Digital Legacy
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.