This month has been an incredible turning point for Neighborlogs and our mission to enable content entrepreneurs, journalists and community members to create lasting, high value local news and information Web sites.
We are more determined than ever to succeed. For one, our investment of money, time and effort in creating community news tools and services has been validated. The purchase of EveryBlock by MSNBC shows that local is soon to be at the core of news gathering and delivery. Meanwhile, the nearly exact duplication of our feature set by Fisher Media's KOMO Seattle neighborhood news sites shows that we knew what we were doing when we launched Neighborlogs more than a year ago. KOMO's limp execution at the neighborhood level illustrates that the centrally managed, cookie cutter approach to local news will never work. You can bring scale to the tools and services of hyperlocal news but the information needs to have some non-scale, high craft effort to be of value.
But even when the big guys try to drive this craft, they fail. How many failed experiments in journalism read like the Washington Post's decision to pull the plug on its hyperlocal effort in Loudoun, VA? All of them. As a commenter on our Central District News site's post about the KOMO 'hood blog effort wrote, corporate media never gets it -- "'It' being what makes blogs exciting. Relevant, timely, somewhat if not completely devoid of censorship, interactive, communal."
Neighborlogs moves forward from this turning point. We recently rolled out network advertising capabilities to enable local site owners to be part of a more powerful group while maintaining their independence. Soon we'll enable these ad tools to be used on sites outside the Neighborlogs platform. We're adding new features to aid independent sites in gathering and reporting local information. And we're ready to keep growing by adding new sites across the country. For example, check out San Diego DTown which is starting to thrive.
If you are interested in joinging us on this path, drop me a line at justin@instivate.com or register for our beta to get your own Neighborlogs-enabled local news and information site.
