The big guys are starting to notice: Neighborhood news sites draw a large, loyal, valuable audience, and can open up a whole new world of small business advertisers.

There's an example here in Seattle, where the new online-only Seattle PI (owned by the Hearst mega-corp) is seeking volunteers to contribute to neighborhood blogs. The PI owns the site, the content and the business. They'll provide the technical platform and some training in important skills like "Twitter." In return, the PI gets free content and a piece of the market in hyperlocal content.

Anyone with a web browser can launch a blog on any number of free services like Wordpress, Blogspot, and our own Neighborlogs. And once they have their own site, they own the content and the opportunity to monetize it with local advertising. In fact, there are at least three neighborhood blogs in Seattle that are bringing in more than one thousand dollars of advertising per month, and a half dozen more earning in the hundreds.

So if anyone can launch a blog and own it and with super amazing services like Neighborlogs at their fingertips, why would they contribute their content for free to an international corporation?

Attention. The PI is banking on catching potential neighborhood bloggers when they are at their weakest. We all start small when trying to build a hyperlocal news audience. There's no other way to do it. Until there's a solid, growing base of neighborhood community members coming back to a site again and again, advertising and other ways to make money (ie, begging!) support only hobby and part-time efforts. Making the leap from part-time to something more is a giant deal. Making that leap when a massive company owns your site and your content? Even harder.

But there is plenty of hope that efforts like the PI won't pollute the environment to the point of hyperlocal extinction. Every neighborhood is different, with its own unique personality, quirks, definitions and cultures. It is highly unlikely that a few geographically defined pages on a much larger news site can develop the same kind of loyal following that a uniquely branded independent site builds.

So, some helpful advice for the big guys. The best way to foster true local community news is sharing resources -- revenue, technology and information -- with independent, highly invested news gatherers and community builders. The smartest play is to work with existing sites to develop an ecosystem of truly local content and advertising. Offer to sell ads on their sites, and take a big commission in the process. Work to share content, with smart aggregation between sites (and go for automated aggregation and curation where possible - editor-driven aggregation doesn't cut it).

In the end, odds are that these big media efforts will find a few good writers. But at some point, those people will decide they'd rather own their content, their business and their destiny, and they will leap over the wall to start their own sites. We hope a few of those leapers will consider Neighborlogs. When they do, we'll owe efforts like the PI's a thank you, we guess.