Citizen news site NowPublic has been sold to another company in the "hyperlocal" space, Examiner.com, the two companies announced Tuesday.
The two sites will operate independently, but Examiner will integrate NowPublic's technology into its site and will encourage NowPublic's contributors to also write for Examiner--right now, the buyer says it has grown 200 percent since the beginning of the year (it launched in April 2008) and has 15,000 active contributors, hoping to hit 30,000 by year's end.
NowPublic's executives, including CEO Leonard Brody, will join the management team of Clarity Digital Group, parent company of Examiner.
"Every day, we hear discussions about whether hyperlocal content will ever be scalable, sustainable, or profitable as a business entity," Examiner CEO Rick Blair said in a release. "With the acquisition of NowPublic, we have the technology to further engage our community of more than 17 million unique visitors per month, and distribute our stories in new and innovative ways."
Was this a bargain-basement acquisition? The companies did not disclose financial terms. But an insider in the space told CNET News that NowPublic had been shopping itself to some pretty big media companies for some time at a higher price than potential buyers were willing to pay. The company had raised about $12 million in venture funding.
Many media companies have simply been launching their own "citizen journalism" initiatives, like CNN's iReport and blogging experiments from newspapers like the Washington Post, which could make an exit tougher for the smaller players.
Digital-media companies like AOL and InterActiveCorp have also made plays to dominate the local-news market--AOL recently acquired local-focused start-ups Patch and Going, the former of which was already a personal investment on behalf of CEO Tim Armstrong, and the Barry Diller-run IAC has been placing a big emphasis on business directory Citysearch.
A nice little summer shopping spree for AOL: Under the auspices of new CEO Tim Armstrong, the company has acquired "hyperlocal" news site Patch and hipster-oriented events listing site Going.com.
The acquisition of Patch isn't too much of a surprise. Armstrong founded and invested in Patch while at his former gig as Google sales chief. The start-up offers a model for local news on the Web and plans to have launched in a dozen cities by the end of 2009. Going, meanwhile, has been around since 2006 and offers event and invitation services along with ticketing. It's likely that AOL will use its technology to take the service beyond its party-friendly current target demographic.
"Local remains one of the most disaggregated experiences on the Web today--there's a lot of information out there but simply no way for consumers to find it quickly and easily," Armstrong said in a release. "Going forward, local will be a core area of focus and investment for AOL. The acquisitions of Patch and Going will help us build out our local network further with excellent local services that enable people to stay better informed about what's going on in their neighborhood."
He's not the only new-media executive thinking local: in his keynote address at the Advertising 2.0 conference on Wednesday, IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller called local "one of the few areas that hasn't been colonized" on the Web. IAC owns Citysearch, with which AOL has partnered in syndication deals.
Today's New York Times has a timely trend piece about the rise of "hyperlocal" news sites--those that aim to create or aggregate news down to the neighborhood (or block). The angle: will these sites take over as an increasing number of local newspapers go under?
If you read tech news regularly, you probably won't find much that's surprising in the article, since sites like Outside.in and Placeblogger have been around for years now. But the question of what will happen, now that struggling newspapers are cutting back on their print editions, or even shutting down altogether, is now a not-so-local issue.
The Times story raises the usual concerns: thoroughness and accuracy. It spotlights one hyperlocal news site, Patch, which was founded and funded by incoming AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong and which aims for a hybrid of the user-generated and traditional news models by hiring community reporters.
What it doesn't mention: that The New York Times Company itself has threatened to shut down one of its regional newspaper properties, The Boston Globe.
Outside.in, a New York-based company that aggregates news and blog discussion around towns and neighborhoods, said Tuesday it has raised $3 million in venture funding and hired a new CEO, former About.com general manager Mark Josephson.
The new funding, which brings Outside.in's total capital raised to $5.4 million, comes from existing investors Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, Betaworks, and a number of angel investors led by George Crowley. A new investor, the New York City Investment Fund, also joined the round. Outside.in said it plans to use the cash infusion to focus on developing and expanding its technology.
The site launched discussion forums earlier this year.
Josephson is replacing co-founder Stephen Berlin Johnson as CEO. Johnson, who made a name for himself before Outside.in as the author of the book Everything Bad Is Good For You, will remain chairman of the board.
Outside.in, a New York-based site that aggregates town-specific news, blog posts, and business listings into a sort of Local News 2.0, formally launched a discussion forum feature on Wednesday.
Thie move puts Outside.in more squarely in the league of Yelp and Craigslist, which supplement their respective business reviews and classifieds listings with lively local message boards.
Obviously, discussion boards don't mean anything if there isn't a solid base of users willing to contribute to them regularly. But there certainly are more than a few people who like to rant about their local school board, sidewalks crowded with strollers, and long lines at the post office, and many neighborhoods don't really have online hubs for town chatter yet.
There's a cool twist to Outside.in's message boards too. You can "attach" a location to your posts--if you're writing about a certain bar, for example, Outside.in will add a link to the listing if it detects the name of a local business. (You get to preview it first.)
Meanwhile, the "hyperlocal" niche of the Web continues to get more crowded, with the launch of EveryBlock last week.
What's currently shaking up on Outside.in's message boards for my home island of Manhattan? Finding the coolest bar in the Lower East Side neighborhood or the best place to go for happy hour around Union Square. It's good to see that users' priorities are in the right place.
New York-based dude-about-town newsletter Thrillist--I've heard its founders describe it as "DailyCandy for guys," though the two are not affiliated--will be expanding further beyond its Gotham roots very soon. Today's edition of the morning read announced that sign-ups are now open for the upcoming Thrillist San Francisco list.
Presumably, it'll be like its existing Gotham and Los Angeles brethren: a mix of restaurant and bar picks with a distinct penchant for high-quality barbecue and stiff cocktails; edgy shopping picks (don't worry, boys, it's O.K. to look dashing); and the latest in the hyperlocal Web, like yesterday's Thrillist New York pick, the Ugly Outfits New York blog.
(Don't live in one of those three cities? There's also a "Thrillist Nation" list for everyone else. The quality's up to par, though the content typically isn't quite as good because the insider-y, "local expert" slant is what makes the New York and Los Angeles editions so readable.)
"This is a big deal for us," the Thrillist e-mail wrote in the announcement that its San Francisco edition is imminent. "We're psyched to get started in a city where the mayor sexes up his underlings, the waters churn with man-eating sharks, and people consume more alcohol per capita than anywhere else in the country (sorry Louisiana and parts of Texas)."
The Bay Area has never sounded so...macho.
(Credit:
DietOut)
When I was in San Francisco earlier this month, I witnessed firsthand the unwritten rule that new start-ups have to throw their debutante balls at the bar-gallery-event space known as 111 Minna, packed right into the dot-com-friendly neighborhood of SoMa. Here in NYC, our enclave of tech companies tends to cluster around SoHo and into the northern edge of Chinatown, but the sizes of properties around there are way too small to accommodate substantial crowds--let alone live music or DJs.
(Case in point: when a TreeHugger/Apartment Therapy/MoCo Loco party a few months ago during New York Design Week packed the Crosby St. space known as The Apartment so full that a line of wannabe attendees stretched all the way around the block...and those in-the-know snuck over to Gawker Media's headquarters next door for a shadow party.)
Blame it on the innate compactness of Manhattan. So I guess companies out here have to be a little bit more creative when they choose an event space. This one might take the creativity cake, though. I was reading on Gawker (speak of the devil) that a yet-to-be-launched start-up called DietOut is throwing some sort of soiree at...upmarket chow hub Whole Foods. To be more specific, the party on Tuesday night will be at Whole Foods Bowery, the recent arrival to a neighborhood that was once known for bums and bar fights and is gradually turning into glass-walled luxury-hotel-and-15-dollar-martini-land. (It's bittersweet.)
DietOut, for future reference, appears to be a sort of neighborhood-based community site with restaurant and shopping information. Based on its choice of venue, and the fact that it has the word "diet" in its name, the crowd it's targeting is going to be more yoga than Yelp.
New music is cool, and hyperlocal start-ups are so hot right now, but really, Whole Foods? Okay, so maybe that means the free food will be flowing like milk and honey, but any event taking place at a major supermarket chain probably shouldn't mark up its invitation with a cool-kid slang theme consisting of "play/rewind/forward/flipside." Fellow New Yorkers, I think we're in need of somewhere that our downtown tech companies can throw big events without looking, well, slightly toolish.
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