EveryBlock’s Adrian Holovaty: Enabling Community Conversation
Journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty has been building out local news databases for a while now. A former Washington Post staffer, Holovaty is also the creator of the open-source platform Django, as well as chicagocrime.org (which later was folded into EveryBlock).
His site, EveryBlock, was founded in 2007 and supported by a grant from the Knight for two years before being acquired by MSNBC in 2009. After several years of being focused on the data of hyperlocal, the site’s recent relaunch signaled a major change of course, with the understanding that community also needs to be part of the equation.
Here, Holovaty answers some questions by email with Street Fight about EveryBlock’s revamp, who is winning the hyperlocal game, and says it’s “too early to tell” on what local advertisers want from hyperlocal...
‘Newsonomics’ Author Ken Doctor: ‘The Play Is for Tablets’
Media industry analyst and consultant Ken Doctor has been watching the local news space for decades, long before “hyperlocal” was coined. He spent 21 years at Knight Ridder, where he first observed that consumers are willing to pay for local content — and contends that they are doing so even now, as they pick up their local paper. Doctor, an analyst for Outsell, a global research and advisory firm, and for his own firm, Content Bridges, frequently appears at conferences about the transformation of the news industry, and writes regular columns both on his own Newsonomics blog and for Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab. He is non-plussed by hyperlocal efforts like EveryBlock and Topix but sees potential in AOL’s Patch…
Journal-Register’s Brady: Local Advertisers Have a Tech Gap
Jim Brady made a name for himself turning WashingtonPost.com into a serious player on the Web before he went to TBD.com last year, going all in on hyperlocal. But TBD shifted course on strategy last fall and let Brady go at the same time. In March, he was scooped up by Journal-Register Company, which has been a leader in transforming local papers into digital properties.
Street Fight recently spoke with Brady about the future of hyperlocal, including mobile’s key role, the hold daily deals companies have on the local ad market and why Patch should be applauded.
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Yipit’s Jim Moran: Lots of Winners in Hyperlocal
With so many daily deals sites popping up in the past year (following the mad success of Groupon), it’s natural that consumers would want a way to sift through, aggregate, and personalize these e-coupons to fit their needs. Enter Yipit, which launched in 2010 and draws on over 400 local deals sites (including Groupon, LivingSocial, and Scoop St.) to deliver customized lists of nearby deals...
Street Fight caught up with the company’s CEO, Jim Moran, for a quick Q&A about Yipit’s mission in the hyperlocal space, and whether the daily deals craze might be a “bubble.”..
A Chicago Retailer is Skeptical of Services Like Groupon
Shelley Young is the chef and founder behind The Chopping Block, a recreational cooking school and retail store in Chicago. Since opening her doors in 1997, Young has seen a dramatic change in the advertising landscape. Whereas she once employed a publicist, she now manages multiple social media accounts in-house and offers check-in specials on Foursquare. She remains skeptical about the long-term viability of daily discount sites.
Baristanet’s Debra Galant: How Patch Is Like Wal-Mart
Since its 2004 launch, Essex County, New Jersey-based Baristanet has often been held up as a hyperlocal news success story. Veteran journalists Liz George and Debra Galant created their local information site to be like a coffee shop where people in the three suburban towns they covered could learn about small-scale news and events around them.
Street Fight spoke recently with Galant about the site’s scope and history, whether stories about potholes can really be monetized, and what she thinks of AOL’s Patch...
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…
My Green Lake’s Duncan: Hyperlocal Means Shop Local
Seattle is one of the hotspots of hyperlocal blogs. Its West Seattle Blog boasts 30,000 visitors per month. Capitol Hill Seattle Blog says it gets more than 120,000 visitors per month. My Green Lake is another Seattle blog, with about 16,000 visitors each month, twice the population of the neighborhood it serves, notes its founder, Amy Duncan. Duncan, a former librarian, started the site in 2009 and runs it as a for-profit business currently featuring more than twenty neighborhood-based display ads and participating in three city-wide advertising networks.
Recently, Duncan, who manages both editorial and advertising at My Green Lake, answered a few questions by email...
Boulder’s Om Time Yoga: ‘Inspiring Content’ Works
For Shannon Paige Schneider, marketing locally to customers of Om Time Yoga, the popular yoga studio she founded in Boulder, Colorado, is about connecting. Schneider has found that her clients respond more to inspiring online content – which she posts daily on Facebook and Twitter – than daily deals and web-based promotions. Schneider recently responded by email to questions from Street Fight for its series of conversations with local retailers.…
Backfence Founder Mark Potts: Hyperlocal Takes Patience
News veteran Mark Potts is best known in the industry for his (failed) site Backfence, which pioneered a hyperlocal model that leveraged user-generated content. … Here Potts speaks with Street Fight about which companies are closest to solving the hyperlocal conundrum, how daily deals companies are changing the equation, and whether it’s really viable to do small-scale news with professional journalists.
EIC Brian Farnham on Patch’s Local-National Dance With HuffPo
AOL’s Patch was, handily, the brainchild of Tim Armstrong before he became the media giant’s CEO. In 800 local communities across the country, Patch is one of the bright spots in hyperlocal business models, with each “Patch” manned by a single editor and an ad sales person, and supported by a network of regional editors. But how will AOL’s acquisition of Huffington Post impact Patch? Well, just yesterday Arianna Huffington announced that she is planning to hire as many as 800 new full-time employees to beef up content on Patch’s network of sites and reduce the use of freelancers. Street Fight spoke recently with editor-in-chief Brian Farnham about Patch’s mission, the importance of pothole stories, how to help local businesses navigate online advertising, and the local-national strategy it’s developing with HuffPo.
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Gowalla’s Josh Williams: Groupon Is One-Dimensional
Location-based check-in service Gowalla is kind of a virtual tour guide, to use the analogy of the day for such companies. Mobile users log in with their location and get information about the places around them, nearby businesses and places their friends recommend. Gowalla integrates both Facebook Places and Foursquare check-ins, and lets users share photographs tagged to places.
Street Fight spoke to the company’s CEO, Josh Williams, who called Groupon “one-dimensional” for now, and discussed the scramble for local ad dollars, the inseparability of mobile and location, and the persistent privacy problem around check-ins...
Roger Smith Hotel: Social Media Beats Location-Based, for Now
If you’ve been to the Roger Smith Hotel in Manhattan, you know it’s hip. And it’s the same online. The “Twitter hotel,” as it’s known, has developed a cult following online thanks to social media maven Adam Wallace, director of digital marketing. Wallace recently spoke to Street Fight for its series of conversations with local businesses.…
Meet the Father of Group Messaging – Upoc
Cynics say everything is derivative. The ignorant never know the difference.
But sometimes it’s worth looking back at what came before, if only to illuminate history for those who simply don’t know, but should.
Case in point: What’s hotter in tech than ‘group messaging’ in all it’s unvaried forms? (Forget group buying a minute.) Answer: not much. GroupMe, groupflier, Beluga, Fast Society, Kik, even Google. These are some of the players lately giving users the ability to communicate over their phones, via text, to many people in one shot. Another popular use is collecting your friends into groups, much like an email list – situational text communities if you will…
5 Questions for Grant Ritchie of Locationary
This is the tenth in a series of Q&As with leaders / up-and-comers in the local space.
Who he is: Grant Ritchie, CEO of Locationary
What he does: A serial entrepreneur, Ritchie is a lawyer and technologist whose day-to-day includes providing Locationary oversight, guidance and direction over operations and technology systems. Prior to Locationary, Grant was a commercial and technology lawyer at a large Toronto firm and was part of the founding team that built and launched several online businesses including Moola.com (a game network with over 430,000 registered members) and CanadianHotelGuide.com…
5 Questions for Jack Eisenberg of MapDing
This is the ninth in a series of Q&As with leaders / up-and-comers in the local space.
Who is he: Jack Eisenberg
What does he do: One of two founders of MapDing (formed last September and self-funded) Jack calls himself a serial entrepreneur who wants to make life easier through mobile technology. “In a previous life, I published a year’s worth of research across Japan and the Netherlands on immigration. I also worked in city government, political consulting, and as an ESL teacher at a non-profit,” he said. The Chicagoan also notes “I will always be an autodidact.” OK!…
5 Questions for Lenny Rachitsky of Localmind
This is the seventh in a series of Q&As with leaders/up-n-comers in the local space.
Who is he: Lenny Rachitsky, 29
What does he do: C-Everything of Localmind, as-yet-launched startup funded by Year One Labs, an incubator out of Montreal
Describe Localmind as if a friend’s mother asked, “So what is this Localmind?
I’m glad you asked, Mrs. Mom…
5 Questions for John Kim of Whrrl (Pelago)
This is the sixth in a series of brief Q&As with leaders and up-and-comers in the local space… 
Describe Whrrl as if a friend’s mother asked, “So what is this Whrrl?
I bet if we asked, you could name off the top of your head three favorite places to go and the things you do at those places. Finding new places that are perfect for you is hard because people are content to stick to what they know.
Whrrl increases the possibility of discovering something new — rather than you finding ideas, we believe the right ideas should find you…
5 Questions for Pia Arthur of Gowalla
This is the fifth in a series of brief Q&As with leaders and up-and-comers in the local space…
Describe Gowalla as if a friend’s mother asked, “So what is this Gowalla?
Gowalla is a social network that inspires people to keep up with friends, share the places they go and discover the extraordinary in the world around them. Like a passport on your phone, Gowalla was born out of a desire to share remarkable places and life journeys in a fun, easy and social way. Since launch, people have visited, commented on and photographed 2 million places in 170 countries with Gowalla…