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Like Seattle-based local media analysis and news site Local Remote, we don't like it when the terms local and hyperlocal get tossed around and misapplied. LR takes a stab at defining what makes hyperlocal special:
We won't venture into the mom blog waters, but we're not sure this definition set satisfies. Like the rest of the hyperlocal experts* on the Internet, we have to toss in our $0.02 on the debate. Here's how Neighborlogs looks at it. Hyperlocal to us is about a set of assets -- not necessarily official borders or measures like population size. Here is that asset package that a hyperlocal site must cover and, equally important,... 
We recently looked at Seattle's hyperlocal ad trends and identified some of the ways that independent community sites are leading the way in creating sustainable business models for advertising supported local news. We've seen scant evidence that big media has learned from any of this -- to date, the typical Seattle big media hyperlocal advertising effort is practically nonexistent while the worst are driven by third-party managed boiler rooms that leave long-term sustainability and present-term SMB relationships shredded in their path. Fortunately, on the content side of the equation, there are signs that big media can have a positive role to play in hyperlocal news. We have been exceptionally hard on Seattle's big media efforts in hyperlocal news and information gathering. But Seattle's big media has done some things that are exceptionally hard on the hyperlocal environment. Now there are signs that, when it comes to the quality and, yes, even quantity of hyperlocal news, big media operations are learning.... Neighborlogs-powered sites now make up four of the 16 neighborhood news sites that are part of the Seattle Times local news partnership. Congratulations, Curt and Ben! Added to the partnership today: Here is the rest of the Seattle neighborhood roster. Our other Neighborlogs family members are CapitolHillSeattle.com and CentralDistrictNews.com. 
How do we know we're building the right thing with Neighborlogs? When we see a dedicated neighborhood news gatherer get his first big advertiser on a Neighborlogs site, we know we're on to something. Congratulations Curt and EastLakeAve -- you're doing a great job. We know it when two more sites using our services have been added to the Seattle Times local news partnership -- that makes four of us now out of 16 neighborhoods. Yay! We also know it when a veteran of the digital hyperlocal scene weighs 15 criteria for picking a content management system for an ad-driven hyperlocal news website and chooses us. That's a good sign! Here are the first three factors for SunValleyOnline's Dave Chase:
Over the next few days, people who care deeply about the future of news and media will come together in Seattle for the Journalism That Matters Pacific Northwest Conference. We'll be there to collaborate and contribute -- and to show off the latest from our http://neighborlogs.com and http://instiads.com services. Over on the JTM Google Group, the conversation on one important topic near and dear to our heart has already begun. One group participant asked the following:
Here is what we've seen in our headquarters city of Seattle, WA.
Almost all activity that advertisers pay for on Seattle community news/hyperlocal news sites is standard... Outside.in knows a little bit about building a business in local content. The company just closed a $7 million round of funding to help grow its hyperlocal news, information and advertising services. When PaidContent.org asked CEO Mark Josephson where on the hyperlocal blackjack table he would place his bet, he played the Neighborlogs card:
Michelle Ferrier is working to build the Women’s Online News Franchise and she's on the hunt for a community news platform to power it that is affordable and scales to the challenge. She has narrowed her options down to four -- and we're happy to note that Neighborlogs made the cut. Here's how Ferrier described Neighborlogs in her write-up: Neighborlogs.com, based in Seattle, offers a blog platform specifically for those doing hyperlocal community news or placeblogs. She also produced a grid comparing Neighborlogs to the three other options she is considering.
While we might take a little offense at the 'struggling' bootstrap part -- we're lean and mean! -- we think Ferrier has identified some of our greatest strengths. Our self-serve ad system designed for businesses of all sizes is ideal for small, one and two person news operations. And, she's right, we're continually developing new tools and improvements for our system. As for the cons, hey, a controlled Beta isn't so bad -- all you need to... The partnership between the Seattle Times and a group of Seattle community news blogs has drawn national attention and praise and helped put the Pacific Northwest on the map as one of the leading areas for media industry innovation. But most large company hyperlocal efforts have not been hits. We've noted the poorly planned attempts of big media attempting to scale down to hyperlocal community news before. I recently had the opportunity to talk with a high ranking employee at a big media operation who is involved in rolling out a cookie-cutter effort to create neighborhood sites across a metro region. This is what I learned. I can't name the employee, the city or the organization because I don't want him or her to get in trouble -- and most of what I learned would definitely cause some furrowed brows in upper management. But I can tell you that all of this is exactly as I heard it as I talked with the employee recently as we discussed their next 'big' effort in the space. Meet Employee H. For Hyperlocal. Employee... Poynter Online writes this week about Seattle's local news scene and includes profiles of some of the city's leading sites including Neighborlogs-powered CapitolHillSeattle.com: Carder believes there is constant demand for neighborhood news. "It's as simple as wondering what that siren you just heard on the street outside was all about. Draw lines from that. The sirens are also local businesses: What's opening? What will it be like? The sirens are city projects: Where should the next park be built? Where did that money go?" he said. "Some media outlets stopped answering those questions. Some did answer them and went out of business. Some never bothered." 
Here's the latest from the Neighborlogs network of sites. Want to start your own neighborhood news site? Register for our beta.
First, we'll start with one response we saw to this plea from Seattlepi.com's 'community editor' for people in the next neighborhood on the Hearst target list to join their corporate 'hood blog effort:
It's a fair question. Here's the mail the writer was responding to:
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... Yesterday, I was writing about a fire that destroyed a building in a city 35 miles from the neighborhood I typically cover. There were family and business connections -- the store that burned is owned by the mother of a local restaurateur -- so I was gathering information and needed a photo. There is a good community of neighborhood bloggers here in Seattle so I'm accustomed to reaching out to other news providers when I need a hand. Yesterday, I gave collaboration a try. First, for background, I asked Tacoma hyperlocal news and info site Exit 133 for a photo of the store as it was before the fire. I also asked Tacoma's daily newspaper for permission to use a photo from the day after showing the fire's aftermath. I didn't even ask for a money shot of the fierce battle to control the flames. Here's what I heard back from the Tacoma News Tribune:
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... 
How broken is the big news business? People get excited when big media give up links on their precious homepages and point to other Web sites. Bad news, big media. Your 'aggregation' is broken. It's slow and it decays to a narrower and narrower set of sources. For an example, pop by your local big media citywide news homepage and check out the list of the few third-party sources they link to day after day. It's a small set that in no way represents the breadth and diversity of the true local news web around you. A step in the correct direction is Outside.in's OIP service. Outside.in for Publishers is an attempt to give local publishers tools to aggregate their local news web. It allows a publisher to set up feeds from sites and information sources that are added to a stream of (mostly!) relevant aggregated content. It's a start toward the edited, or curated, news web.
Much of what the big media so-called aggregation doesn't accomplish is achieved by the OIP service. It's fast, it'... 
Contact Justin Carder justin@neighborlogs.com or call (206) 399-5959 Neighborlogs tends to take a Seattle-centric view of hyperlocal. It's our HQ, for one, we have a lot of our beta sites operating here in the city and there's a rich environment of community news sites that is continuing to grow. But there's a big world beyond our home. This Seattle data mining guru asks where else is hyperlocal news taking off? Interesting responses thus far:
Outside.in also featured this list of neighborhoods around the country that were lucky enough to have multiple blogs covering their news and information. Your community need a neighborhood news blog or three? Register for the Neighborlogs beta. Here is some overseas inspiration for a way to connect in the real world with your local news community. From the New York Times:
No... Local NPR affiliate KUOW has started broadcasting on-air roundtables featuring Seattle neighborhood news bloggers. Last week, I was part of the debut episode of The Conversation show's Neighborhood News sessions. You can enjoy that discussion here starting around the 14:20 mark. This week, KUOW has invited another neighborhood news provider from team Neighborlogs -- company prez Scott Durham will be on the air talking about the latest happenings in the Central District along with bloggers from the Rainier Valley Post and Tacoma's Exit 133. It's very cool for KUOW to recognize the important information flow that is happening in the area's neighborhoods and to give voice to some of the great people behind the news sites. For all the talk about big news sites aggregating and pointing to community news sites, it's even more exciting to see a growing respect for these site owners and opportunities for them to directly reach more people. The roundtable is scheduled for Thursday during the noon hour. You can listen...
With a mayoral race, city council seats up for grabs and a battle for the King County Executive slot, to name a few, Seattle has a summer of campaigning and, yes, political advertising ahead. The re-election campaign for incumbent mayor Greg Nickels showed that it won't be political advertising as usual, however. The mayor's team announced they have launched a campaign on 13 Seattle area sites including several neighborhood news blogs. There have been some experiments with political advertising on select neighborhood news sites in Seattle and on other sites in the city in past campaigns but it's really exciting that people are starting to see neighborhood and community news sites as a better way to get the word out. There is no better way to reach specific neighborhoods than to be part of sites that are dedicated to covering the area's news, events and people. It's a great beginning but hopefully these campaigns are just getting started. First, there are a lot more sites to be part of. There were at least... Thanks much to all the locals who participated in this episode of NPR's On the Media: The Inheritance Of Loss It's a great discussion of the new local media landscape here in Seattle and a great listen for anybody thinking about jumping in with an independent, local, online news effort. Two voices deserve special thanks for their part in the program. Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog once again says exactly the right things about what her online news business is building and the way journalism is being shaken by new tools and, more importantly, new focus on community news. Eli Sanders of Seattle's alt weekly the Stranger, meanwhile, deserves bigger thanks for, one, mentioning the neighborhood news blog that I run at capitolhillseattle.com or, as Eli referred to it, the "Capitol Hill Seattle Blog." Don't know you Eli, but thanks! Surprised to see how many... We are excited to introduce an important new member of the Neighborlogs family -- InstiNews made its debut over the long Memorial Day Weekend, powering Pacific Northwest news start-up the Seattle PostGlobe.
InstiNews is built on the same foundation that makes Neighborlogs a powerful tool for neighborhood blogs and news sites. InstiNews builds on this foundation and offers more advanced tools to suit the needs of larger news organizations. Our goal with InstiNews is to provide news organizations with an easy-to-use service that:
Building tools and services for the truly local content and advertising industry has its challenges. For one, it's an environment, thankfully, dominated by thousands of independent sites and businesses. For another, there's the damn word hyperlocal. It's used to describe everything from fully automated aggregators to finely crafted mom and pop journalism. That's confusing. It's confusing to the businesses and site owners, it's confusing to advertisers and it's confusing to the communities and audiences that have grown to love these offerings. Seeking to bust through this haze, EveryBlock's Adrian Holovaty suggested way back in December 2008 that what his service was doing was not 'hyperlocal' but instead... Microlocal. Hmmm. Living in Microsoft... Company prez Scott Durham was part of a panel discussing sustainable business models for journalism last night in Seattle. The No News is Bad News forum gathered area online entrepreneurs to discuss what it takes to survive and thrive in the new era of new media. You can view a video archive of the event here. Given that there was a room full of journalists gathered and a lot of people tuning into the proceedings online, the Twitter stream from the event was rich. Here are some of our favorite Tweets from the night. There was a wide spectrum of ground covered -- but the selected focus on issues central to Neighborlogs, neighborhood blogs and hyperlocal content:  jamiegriswold: Dang didn't tag. Don't think journalists are lost just need to reinvent. #nnbn
  westseattleblog: @scottdurham - journalists, KEEP WRITING! even if you're not doing it for money at the... |
