After my stints at LocalVox (which worked with local merchants to distribute their marketing information) and then at Blankslate (which was effectively the publisher of several of the largest local blogs in the country) I consider myself well out of local media. I still follow the space still by subscribing to Street Fight. Like every news and pundit site they offered their list of things to look for in 2016. I was struck by the fact that none of their prognostications dealt with it, focusing instead on retailers, startup services, and beacons.
It was also interesting to me because I had just read an article on Nieman Journalism Lab about adding local news to people’s walls on FB. This in turn led me to think about outside.in where I had worked to develop a local blogger network and a toolkit that mapped stores to their locations. Outside.in may have been a bit ahead of its time as aggregating local stories and then placing them into FB and Snapchat would probably be a good service given how hard media is in general now an how difficult hyperlocal media is on top of that. It wouldn’t solve the problems that the creators of the stories face but it could get them in front of an audience where good things might happen. Foursquare might end up doing something similar with ads.
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