When Local News Gets Hyper

With tiny staffs and plenty of traffic, neighborhood blogs may prove to be a viable model for online news.

By Steve Reno | June 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

With advertising revenues for
print media going nowhere but down over the past five years, the big question
in media has been whether or not a viable business model exists for online
journalism.

Tracy Record, whose West
Seattle Blog posted revenues in the six
figures this year, may have an answer.

Although it started in 2005 as a
source of opinions and observations about the neighborhood, West Seattle
Blog quickly garnered enough attention to
prompt local businesses to ask for advertising space. In 2007, Record resigned
as assistant news director at KCPQ-TV to work on the blog full time. Record
became the editor and her husband, Patrick Sands, sold advertisements.

Today, the word “blog” doesn’t do
the site justice. The West Seattle Chamber of Commerce named West Seattle
Blog its Business of the Year for 2009.
That same year, West Seattle Blog
ranked No. 5 on Google’s list of the most-searched local terms for the entire
city of Seattle.

The blog is still a two-person
operation making all of its revenue from display ads. Although Record won’t say
exactly how much the blog is making, it does earn enough to pay freelance
contributors, and she has plans to hire full-time staff later this year.

“You can’t run something like this
with the layers of management that corporate media always have,” Record says.
“Everybody has to be directly engaged in producing something rather than just
supervising the people who produce something.”

Record’s success inspired Seattle
journalist Cory Bergman to launch Next Door Media, a network of neighborhood
blogs, in 2008.

“We felt that their model was
something that had some real traction,” Bergman notes.

Like West Seattle Blog, Next Door Media’s blogs are powered by display ads,
which sell for $75 to $150 per month. Each blog is edited by a journalist
living in the neighborhood, and the vast majority of the revenue from each site
goes to its editor. Although Bergman is also hesitant to release numbers, Next
Door Media recently added three new blogs—MyWallingford, MapleLeafLife and WedgwoodView—to its
network, and may add more this year.

“We’re not a high-cost enterprise,
so we don’t feel pressured to drive more revenue,” Bergman says.

Hyperlocal sites are not just
small business ventures. Last year, Fisher Communications Inc. launched a
network of 43 hyperlocal neighborhood websites in the Seattle area. The sites
were based on an online platform developed by Bellevue-based DataSphere, which
raised $10.8 million in investments this year.

However hyperlocal sites develop
their business models, Bergman predicts an “explosion” of neighborhood news
sites across the country, and sees Seattle at the forefront of the emerging
trend.

“The Seattles, Portlands and San Franciscos
of the world will see a more vibrant neighborhood blog culture than elsewhere in
the country,” he says.