Hyperlocal Pioneer Howard Owens Sees New Mobile App as Key to Scaling Beyond His ‘Batavian’
Eight and a half years after launching his hyperlocal news site The Batavian, in upstate New York, Howard Owens is looking at growing his base company, Album Corp., beyond Batavia to multiple locations. His plan for expansion is driven by a homemade mobile app that he’s experimenting with for the site.
Street Fight Daily: Airbnb’s Next Mega-Round, Samsung Debuts Mobile Payments
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Airbnb Is Raising A Monster Round At A $20B Valuation (TechCrunch)… Samsung Actually Stands A Fighting Chance In Mobile Payments (Quartz)… Uber Discloses Data Breach That May Have Affected 50,000 Drivers (GigaOm)…
Community Publishers Mixed on Borrell Prescription for Content
Gordon Borrell minced no words in Street Fight recently when he talked about content and audience in the revenue-hot digital space that his new annual local media report pinpoints. He said: “It’s so much not about readers. It’s so much more about consumers. So those folks who are trying to develop hyperlocal sites around good […]
How Community Involvement Can Pay Off for Local Publishers
Commuter traffic tie-ups and convenience store holdups can’t be the heart of a community news product. “Duty” coverage is still part of many sites’ content menu, but, by itself, it can’t build a solid relationship with community. The trick is to empower users “to take action to improve their communities”…
Hyperlocal Publishing: Who Stumbled, Who Was Nimble and What’s Next?
The big story in hyperlocal publishing this year was the fall of corporate hyperlocal pureplays like Patch, and Everyblock — big bets that failed to reach sustainability. And so as we look to the New Year, a persistent question once again emerges for community news: when will publishers find a digital model that works?
Should Hyperlocal Publishers Accept Barter Deals?
Most of the better known hyperlocal sites we contacted told us they didn’t do trade or barter, and they didn’t want to talk about it on the record. In Dallas, hyperlocal pioneer Mike Orren said people don’t talk about it because they don’t want to attract the attention of auditors, or they don’t want competitors to know that they’ll do barter. He agreed, however, that trade is “absolutely viable” for independents…
Howard Owens on What It Takes to Sustain a Hyperlocal News Site
“If there’s any clear message, it’s what I’ve been saying for the past four or five years: Starting and running a local news site is hard work,” says the Batavian editor and publisher. “You need a good model, a solid plan, the ability to work long hours and handle multiple disciplines and stick with it for years and years with no promise of ever striking it rich. If you can do that, you’re on the right track.”
Will ‘Breaking Promos’ Help Hyperlocals Bring New Customers to SMBs?
SMBs have been flocking to social sites like Facebook, where they can set up neat pages about their products and service. That’s fine, says Scott Karp, but “the only customers they reach are existing ones.” To solve this, his service Breaking Promos lets SMBs create pages on a social site that runs within the pages of hyperlocal news sites….
Getting Local Online Ad Dollars to Flow Into Hyperlocal News
Hyperlocal news sites are turning up everywhere, but advertisers aren’t following them nearly as fast. “Advertisers don’t want to be around local news,” Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, told Street Fight. I went to several people building business models around hyperlocal news to find out how they are planning to turn the tables on Borrell’s assessment…
Can Local Publishers Successfully Charge for Online?
The key for small-to-medium-sized legacy publishers online is keeping it local. The New York Times has unmatched quality, The Wall Street Journal has unmatched business insight and analysis, and the Concord Monitors and The Tulsa Worlds of the industry must have unmatched local content. If so, newspaper paywalls, at least in the short term, might be more than just a “Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”
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)…
Owens, Tucker Spar Over Indies’ Profitability
Last week, The Batavian’s Howard Owens penned a post on his personal blog about why independent hyperlocal sites were better positioned to be profitable long-term than scaled hyperlocal networks. Main Street Connect’s Carll Tucker, who believes that he has come upon a scalable formula for hyperlocal profitability, responded to Owens’ post last week, setting off a lively debate in the posts’ comments section over whether indies or scaled networks really have the upper hand when it comes to profitability…
Why DNAinfo’s Shuttering Isn’t a Reflection on the Hyperlocal Digital Opportunity
The shuttering of these sites was a failure of a business, not a failure of opportunity. The opportunity is there. A multi-billion dollar opportunity. It just needs the right model and good execution to grasp it.