Street Fight Daily: 12.06.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare Hits 15 Million Users (BetaBeat)…
Gowalla Versus Foursquare: Why Pretty Doesn’t Always Win (TechCrunch)…
Newsday to Hire 25 in Hyperlocal Digital Expansion (Poynter)…
Street Fight Daily: 11.28.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
SCVNGR is Building Local Mobile Payments Groundswell With LevelUp (ReadWriteWeb)…
Study: 56% of People Still Dig Daily Deals (ReadWriteWeb)…
LocalUncle Says ‘Screw Google’ — Ask Humans Instead (TheNextWeb)…
Street Fight Daily: 10.28.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Google is collaborating with discount luxury network Gilt City as it looks to expand its Google Offers deals service. The partnership comes as the search giant has been adding a number of new coupon features and retailers to its mobile payments product, Google Wallet. (PaidContent)…
The Guardian is testing a new hyperlocal service called “n0tice,” which is an attempt to create a publishing platform based on location — and it uses the metaphor of a community noticeboard to get there. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.26.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Margo Georgiadis is leaving her job as Groupon’s COO after just five months on the executive team to return to Google, her former employer, as President, Americas. The company has also filed an amended S-1, which includes revised revenue numbers based on a change in accounting. (TechCrunch)…
One self-described “riled” Patch editor from the East Coast says that in addition to his or her normal job responsibilities, this editor has also been asked to start drumming up ad sales leads. (Business Insider)…
Why Hyperlocals Are Making Anonymity Obsolete
I don’t ordinarily read anonymous comments, but “patriotmommy” stopped my browsing eyes recently on Patch’s Reston, Va., site. I was reading an upbeat story about graduation at the high school where my two daughters were educated. The article noted that South Lakes High produced a “record number” of International Baccalaureate candidates this year. At the […]
Hyperlocal Scoreboard: Two Close Watchers Total It Up
The Poynter Institute’s Mallary Jean Tenore and Rick Edmonds are must-reads in the digital media world. Their pieces on hyperlocal, while not numerous, have been extensively linked, tweeted and commented on. Tenore came of age in the digital era, while Edmonds entered his first newsroom when the IBM Selectric typewriter was still the standard…
Hyperlocal Post-Mortem: Lessons Learned From InJersey
When we made the decision this week to shutter InJersey.com — a network of hyperlocal sites across the garden state that I helped build, nurture, and raise like a child -—my biggest fear was that the effort would be branded a failure. In the age of Twitter, I was braced for the #epicfail hashtag. It came instead via Slate, in the form of a Jack Shafer missive…
WSB’s Tracy Record: You Can’t Do Hyperlocal on a Template
When West Seattle Blog launched, the site didn’t carry any ads — not even Google Adsense ads which co-founder Tracy Record thought were “ugly and cluttery.” At the time, the site was more of a passion project than a business. But when they finally got advertising two years later, Record says it didn’t take very long before she and her partner were turning a profit: “It was rather rapid in terms of people embracing us and we were in the black in the first year.” …
Topix CEO Chris Tolles: Community Over Content
When hyperlocal news and community site Topix was founded in 2004, the company’s plan was to take all the local news out there and aggregate it into niche news Web pages around hundreds of thousands of topics. The site’s algorithm sorted through 50,000 news sources and created feeds around all kinds of subjects, creating niche content aggregation. But in 2007, the company shifted gears after finding what it thought was an even more compelling product: harnessing the flood of user-generated commentary and debate around their topic areas. Street Fight spoke with CEO Chris Tolles about how hyperlocal has evolved, Patch’s place in the pack, and how journalism is actually just a means to an end…
Case Study: N.Y. Bookstore Finds Value in Hyperlocal Ads
As the owner of Present Tense, an independent bookstore in Batavia, N.Y., Erica Caldwell maintains close ties to her local community. She uses online and offline advertising to strengthen these bonds, running advertisements concurrently on hyperlocal news websites like The Batavian as well as her community newspaper.
At Chicago Summit, Local ‘Indies’ Get Down to Business
Last week’s Block by Block Community News Summit 2011 was a combination mirror and crystal ball where independent local publishers saw both what they have accomplished and what they need to do to ensure that what they created with their credit cards, sweat and tears would be around years from now…