Tag hyperlocal

Work with us, people

GateHouse Media is hiring two reporters. Here’s the important bit from Boss Owens’ post on the matter:

The ideal candidate:

  • A recent college graduate (or graduating this spring)
  • At least six months experience blogging
  • Capable of shooting and editing his or her own video
  • Ready to do more than sit in an office and make phone calls or pull the latest agenda item from a city council meeting and try to turn it into a story
  • Believes in local news and local community and sees a role for journalism in helping a community communicate and learn about what is happening in that community

Go read that whole post and write to howens [AT] gatehousemedia [DOT] com if you’re interested.

As an added bonus, I’ll probably bug you on IM and Twitter and SMS all day about when you’re posting your next video or blog post or podcast or whatever you choose to produce.

Wicked Local Is Wicked Interesting – State of Local

A nice write-up that does a good job of explaining the advantages of the Wicked Local platform for suburban Boston news sites run by GateHouse. via Howard.

Wicked Local Is Wicked Interesting – State of Local

The Student Newspaper Survival Blog: Curleyizing your student newspaper

“I’ve seen new media guru Rob Curley give basically the same speech four times in the past few years, but I always find his message inspiring.”

The Student Newspaper Survival Blog: Curleyizing your student newspaper

ZIPskinny demographic information for 95060 – SANTA CRUZ CA

As always, this is the sort of stuff that belongs on a local newspaper site as evergreen content. Answer the questions locals and out-of-towners have about your neighborhoods.

ZIPskinny demographic information for 95060 – SANTA CRUZ CA

Noozhawk

Santa Barbara gets a(nother) local online news start-up vying to replace the floundering News-Press. Built in Joomla.

Noozhawk

Citysquares.com – Buy Local

Hyperlocal business directory, ratings and reviews, but the UI is sort of all over the place – comes out looking like icon soup.

Citysquares.com – Buy Local

Covering Communities

Useful site to share with reporters and editors trying to understand how to cover their communities without writing meeting stories.

Covering Communities

When local newspapers aren’t local | yelvington.com

Your ‘circulation area’ is too damn big: Cover your community and do it well. That’s local news, not a bunch of outdated world-on-your-doorstep crap. Doubly true online.

When local newspapers aren’t local | yelvington.com

If you can’t beat ‘em, or buy ‘em, use the API

Newspapers should produce amazing local databases with great maps, ratings and reviews.

A newspaper company should buy Yelp.

Yelp now has an open API. Newspapers should stop trying to develop something better, and use the API to provide users with Yelp’s functionality on their own sites, applied to their local businesses.

Apply that logic everywhere it makes sense. No need to re-invent the wheel if you can tap into a massive database for free using an API, a la Google Maps mashups.

Do it this week.

Hyperlocal is about people, not politics – Howard Owens

Let’s all scream it together now, in our best Charlton Heston drama-king voice: “Soylent Green is made of people!”

Hyperlocal is about people, not politics – Howard Owens