The Washington Post has announced that it introducing a new hyperlocal website devoted specifically to Loudoun County, Virginia. The Chicago Tribune made a similar announcement last week. MCHX is mentioned in the article. There is no reason that MCHX can't develop affiliate relationships with these websites.
July 16, 2007
Loco for local!
By Paul R. LaMonica
Who cares about the presidential race or what’s going on around the world? Of course, that’s a little glib. National and international news is important. But several media companies are beginning to realize that many of their readers are more interested in learning about what’s going on in their backyard than what’s taking place hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.
To that end, the Washington Post (WPO) announced Monday that its washingtonpost.com Web site was launching a site devoted entirely to in-depth coverage of news and events in Loudoun County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
LoudounExtra.com will feature news, videos, blogs and user-generated content about the community. I met with Rob Curley, the vice president of product development for Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive, last week to discuss the new Loudoun site as well as the media company’s strategy for future “hyperlocal” sites. Curley said plans are in the works to launch a site for Fairfax, Virginia within the next few months.
Curley said that a team of five reporters will file stories daily to the LoudounExtra.com site in addition to working for the print publication of the Washington Post. Some of the other “hyperlocal” features on the site include a database of local restaurants, information about all the churches and other places of worship in the county as well as schools. Each high school football player will have a page dedicated to them. And you thought they worshipped high school sports in Texas!
Can this approach to local coverage work? Curley said he believes it will since local has often been an underserved market, particularly among large metropolitan newspapers.
For this reason, many top-notch blogs have popped up across the country that focus on particular communities. Heck, there is even a blog focused entirely on the relatively small Kensington neighborhood in Brooklyn that I live in…and it’s usually among the first sites I visit every morning to get up-to-date on the news that’s important to me.
And clearly, the Washington Post is not alone in its enthusiasm for local coverage. Yahoo (YHOO) has actually done a pretty impressive job of bulking up its local presence online. Arguably, this is one of the few areas where it has outdone Google (GOOG).
Another Internet company called Marchex (MCHX) is making a huge bet on local advertising. It owns more than 100,000 Web domain names for specific zip codes as well as generic domain names like newyorkdoctors.com and lasvegasvacations.com. Barry Diller’s IAC (IACI) also has a big presence in local through its Citysearch business. Then there’s sites like online classified service craigslist and review site Yelp. They are intensely local.
Curley said the goal of the Loudon site and any future local sites that Washington Post develops is to make sure that it is serving its readers’ best interests and of course provide local businesses a spot to advertise.
“This is clearly built for small restaurant owners and not Toyota or United Airlines,” Curley said.
So it seems that the only thing left that needs to be done to really make “hyperlocal” sites a huge destination for readers and advertisers is to effectively tie marketing to the story. Something tells me that it won’t be long before we go to our favorite community news site to read about a cat stuck in a tree only to wind up having an ad for a ladder from the closest hardware store pop up on the side of the text.
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