Street Fight Daily: PayPal Expands In-Store, Hyperlocal Media Defended
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… PayPal Adds New Retailers For In-Store Payments Product; Tests Order-Ahead Pickup At Jamba Juice (TechCrunch)… Hyperlocal is Deserving of Its Hype (The Guardian)… Scoutmob Finds Surprise Success with Etsy Competitor Shoppe (PandoDaily)…
Street Fight Daily: LivingSocial Hires CMO, Patch Talks Profitability
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.…. AOL Says One Out of Nine Patch Sites Profitable (SmartMoney)… Former Best Buy CMO Barry Judge Joins LivingSocial to Head Marketing (AllThingsD)… A Dire Prediction For Foursquare, With a Big Asterisk (Forbes)…
Street Fight Daily: Why Hyperlocals Flop, Everyblock Launches Ads
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… The Neighborhood Watch: Why Do Community News Sites, Once Hailed as the Future of Journalism, so Often Flop? (AdWeek)… EveryBlock Launches Native Ads (Everyblock Blog)… Far Fewer People Are Using Facebook Offers Than Facebook’s News Feed Says (Business Insider)…
Street Fight’s Most Popular Stories of 2012
On this last day of 2012, here’s a look back at some of the Street Fight stories that really piqued your interest this year (at least as far as pageviews go). We’re grateful for all of your support this past year, and we look forward to bringing you more great content, research, and events about sustainable hyperlocal business models in 2013!
Street Fights of 2012: Making Sense of Content Economics
Hyperlocal media continued to wrestle with the economics of content, as some of the most promising concepts of years past were put to the test in 2012. The Journatic scandal revealed the ethical quicksand that can accompany innovation. Meanwhile, the iterations at Patch reaffirmed that original local journalism produced by professional journalists is difficult to scale…
Street Fight Daily: Patch Editors Anticipate Cuts, Foursquare Opens Data
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Patch Editors Say Staff and Budgets are Being Cut in 2013 (Romenesko)… Foursquare to Make Full Names Public and Share More Check-ins with Businesses (The Verge)… Foursquare to Make Full Names Public and Share More Check-ins with Businesses (The Verge)… Mobile’s Path to Glory (The Wall Street Journal)…
Openings & New Hires at Locu, Groupon, Patch, Signpost, and More…
There’s lots happening in hyperlocal as the year comes to a close: Locu snags PayPal vet Mok Oh as an adviser, plus lands a hot ex-Googler. Booker brings on a dynamic duo in its hiring spree. Patch sees big moves at the top. And there are some shifts at Groupon and open gigs at Telenav, Signpost, Swipely, Yellowbook, Yelp, and more…
Patch Adds COO as Leadership Change Continues
AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal news sites has made yet another significant change at the top, naming former Westwood One operations head Steve Kalin to the newly created position of president and COO. Kalin will take responsibility for the company’s daily operations — with the advertising, finance, marketing and content functions all reporting to him…
Openings & New Hires at Patch, MapQuest, Local.com, and More
At JiWire, another departure; Patch brings on a few new department heads; UBL and Delivery.com continue to add to their teams. Plus, longtime Borrell Associates executive Peter Conti makes the jump to Local Media Association, and JT Batson becomes chief revenue officer at Cumulus Media. Looking for a new gig? Openings at Local.com, Patch, Microsoft, Google and more…
Patch CCO Talks Election Coverage: Virtual News Teams, Trending Hashtag
The election was a big national story, but it was also an important local story — and served as yet another crucible to test how deeply hyperlocal network Patch has woven itself into the 850+ communities it serves across the country. Rachel Feddersen, Patch’s Chief Content Officer, spoke with Street Fight this week about how the network approached and executed its election coverage, and what potential lessons the event had for the rest of the news cycle.
Managing Through Crisis: Yext, Patch & GramercyOne in Superstorm Sandy
We asked three hyperlocal companies based in New York City, Patch, GramercyOne and Yext, to share the details on how they dealt with Superstorm Sandy. Their experiences shared the same urgency around helping their employees find shelter and safety. But they way they kept the day-to-day work going differed, largely reflecting the differences in their businesses: while Yext set up temporary headquarters in Times Square; Patch told everyone to stay home and kept operations humming with a remote workforce; meanwhile, GramercyOne leaned on tools that didn’t require location or physical presence.
Inside Patch During Superstorm Sandy
In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, a big news event for hyperlocal publishers, we asked Patch’s chief content officer Rachel Feddersen to give us the scoop on how the AOL unit managed its own business during the storm: “When my colleagues and I weren’t able to commute to the city during the storm and in the days following, we just joined our field work force.”
Openings & New Hires at Patch, Yelp, Supermedia, HopStop, Square & More
Executives moving on up and over lately in sales, product, marketing, business development and more. Plus, who’s hiring? Yext, Yelp, Yodle, Restaurant.com, LivingSocial, DealHeaven, Apple and HopStop. Hyperlocal is expanding fast, and these openings are just one indication. Listings include links on where to apply. Get started now!
Street Fight Daily: Patch To Profit in 2014, Google Expands Promotions
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… 
AOL’s Patch ‘in Line to Make a Profit’ (The Guardian)… Google Launches Promotions On Google Shopping, Enables Distribution To Google Offers & Maps On Android, Too (TechCrunch)… The Future Of Location-Based Marketing Isn’t Foursquare (Marketing Land)…
EveryBlock President: Economics of Hyperlocal Editorial ‘Broken’
The MSNBC.com-owned hyperlocal network rebooted in 2011, shifted its product’s focus toward a more interactive product centered largely around user-generated content. We caught up with EveryBlock’s president, Brian Addison (who will be appearing as a speaker at the Street Fight Summit), to discuss the role of data, editorial and user-generated content in the future of hyperlocal news…
Street Fight Daily: Seattle PD Tap Hyperlocal Tweets, Armstrong Talks Patch
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Hey, @SeattlePD: What’s the Latest? (New York Times)… AOL’s Tim Armstrong Talks Ads, Patch, and HuffPost Live (AdWeek)… The Future of Mobile News (Project for Excellence in Journalism)…
We’ve Seen the Past — And It Is ‘The Neighborhood’
For the past few years, social startups have been spiraling inward toward a smaller and smaller target: your neighborhood, your block. Now Patch is going all in by to leverage neighborhoods through communities of interest. But maybe neighborhoods are an artificial constructs, with borders that mean little even to those they bind. If that’s the case, we need to rethink a lot more than design and tools and lessons of the past…
Sizing the Industry: Who Gets Counted as ‘Hyperlocal?’
Since we launched Street Fight in April of last year, one question has come up again and again that we don’t have a very good answer for: “How many hyperlocal news sites are currently operating in the U.S. — and is that number growing? And if it’s growing, how fast is it growing?”