Journalists continue to search for a viable business model that supports online hyperlocal publications, but they won’t ever reach the threshold of revenues to maintain operations if they rely solely on traditional advertising fees from local merchants. That doesn’t mean local advertising is also poised to fall off a cliff. On the contrary, BIA/Kelsey states [...]
The classic, and perhaps only business model supporting hyperlocal journalistic efforts like Patch.com and other local media is local advertising. On StreetFightMag.com last week, Ted Mann, Digital Development Director for Gannett NJ, discusses why Gannett’s hyperlocal experiment InJersey.com failed. The main and obvious reason is simply local advertising cannot adequately cover expenses. So… What if [...]
Local community news has always been hard to produce profitably with scale. Local news is only relevant to those who live within the community, and it makes cost per thousand based advertising models untenable when readership may log in the hundreds. Without a revenue model to hire editors and writers, the cheapest way to source [...]
AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post firmly entrenches AOL as a journalistic media endeavor eye-to-eye with Gannett, Murdoch and, gasp, the other newspapers. What is strikingly different about Huffington Post is that content is sourced from celebrities – politicians, actors, college professors, locals – and not from the ivory news desks that still embody the [...]
The powerful launch of Google Buzz (Mashable | Google Buzz has completely changed the game) last week signals the arrival of the Real Time Web as a truly new media. It’s been well documented that Twitter has established itself a breaking news source. Google Buzz, Facebook and Twitter form a triumvirate channel for sourcing news [...]
Based on the web statistics presented in the previous slideshow, I’ve been asked for reasons why breaking local news receives 15+ clickthroughs per tweet across Breaking News Network city sites. With a little analysis, we discovered that the Breaking News sites are generally the first to tweet out a newly published article from local news [...]
Big media investment into hyperlocal media properties continues with CNN’s partial investment in Outside.in as reported at Paid Content.org. CNN likely plans to leverage Outside.in content to develop local aggregated news for CNN Local editions. My first thought is why does CNN need a content aggregation service when they can do essentially the same thing [...]
Google Fast Flip launched today to uniformly good reviews because this is an application that should have existed even ten years ago. It’s like a magazine rack display of major press that uses the “like” feature to push the more popular articles up. So why didn’t the packaging of news into a virtual rackspace take [...]
Patrick Kitano is founding Principal of Brand into Media, a unique strategy group working with corporations and organizations to develop social and media-based strategies that engage hyperlocal communities.
I'm the author of Media Transparent, and contributor to Street Fight, Social Media Today, Daily Deal Media, The Customer Collective, and Quora.
I speak on the future of social commerce at conferences associated with social media, local advertising and real estate.
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