Starting today, CBS is providing Yahoo! with local news clips from its 16 owned and operated stations in exchange for a big chunk of the Yahoo! local news page, links back to the local station sites and a revenue share from advertising sold by Yahoo!.
Under the deal, the CBS stations are receiving prominent placement …

LinkedIn, the service that greases the wheels of virtual networking, is extending that concept to the Yellow Pages, by offering a directory of local service listings, with a layer of social networking. Here is a write-up on Red Herring.
LinkedIn says the move is not about creating a rival to the A-Z Yellow Pages, since …

I was at the Association of Directory Publishers meeting in Virginia last week. There was the usual bread-and-butter how-to content (distribution efficiency, for example) plus a little of the usual red meat incumbent bashing for the independent publisher faithful, though I might add a bit less than usual.
On Friday afternoon, ADP announced an arrangement …

GateHouse Media, a rollup of community newspapers and shoppers operating in 285 markets, has hired Melinda Gipson from the Newspaper Association of America's New Media Federation. Gipson has been a cornerstone of the New Media Federation since February 1995 — 11 years. For much of that time, she partnered with Rob Runett, who left in …

It is depressing for online newspapers that Yahoo! and other portals generally outpace them in their own communities. But not so fast, says Shawn Riegsecker, a founder of Centro, an ad network dedicated to localizing ad buys for national marketers, such as GM.
"Any of the four portals have over twice the reach of …

Being a frequent YouTube user, I just stumbled upon this. Chad and Steve, the cofounders of YouTube, have sent a message to the world about the Google acquisition in what other form but a YouTube video clip. Either these guys are shocked and hysterical at their newfound wealth (in Google stock), or they are simply …

Judy's Book cofounder Andy Sack posts very candidly about the difficulties of launching a review/IYP site. Sack, who also founded Abuzz, one of the original review sites, and worked on Firefly, knows something about this subject by now.
Founded in 2004 at around the same time as Insider Pages, which just changed CEOs, Judy's Book …

Citysearch has been around the local scene for so long that it often gets overlooked. But the IAC division plans a significantly higher profile in early 2007, with a relaunch of its site, a big push on local and national sales, and re-branding efforts that will do away with the "Yellow Pages" moniker, among other …

There has been no shortage of coverage and commentary on Google's acquisition of YouTube this week. Without content assets or unique technology, the acquisition has been viewed with a skeptical eye by many in the media and analyst communities. This is made worse by liabilities perceived in YouTube's video licensing issues, which many believe will …

Insider Pages founder Stu MacFarlane has been replaced as CEO by Mitch Galbraith, a veteran of Yahoo!'s small-business division who was recently brought in as VP of advertising. The change at the top appears to have been initiated by Insider's investors, which include IdeaLab, Sequoia Capital and Softbank.
The turn of events is a surprise. In …

Related to last week’s discussions on the challenges and opportunities of user-generated content (and somewhat related to yesterday’s news of Google’s acquisition of YouTube), eMarketer has some positive data on the revenue-generating potential of UGC.

And they just keep plugging away and plugging away at microsites. A new Bay Area company, Smalltown, has launched a microsite service in San Mateo and Burlingame that serves as kind of a commerce-oriented city guide/Yellow Pages. The service has received $3 million in funding from Formative Ventures, a tech-oriented VC.
Micro-sites certainly seem to …

Craigslist will be adding $25 fees Oct. 22 for recruitment ads in four more markets: Boston; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and San Diego. The markets join New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco as cities where fees have been imposed on its mainstream recruitment ads. (In homebase SF, recruitment ads are $75.) Beyond an additional …

After many days of swirling rumors about a Google acquisition of YouTube, the companies announced today that this will happen. Read the press release here, a recording of the conference call that followed the announcement here, and more to come on this blog and in this week’s issue of Local Media Journal.

Call it sour grapes. But a year after famous talking head Michael Kinsley was thrown out as the Los Angeles Times' editorial page editor, he finally lets loose on Tribune Co. and its problems "fixing" the Times.
In various comments, Kinsley said the Times is still one of the best newspapers out there. But he …

TV station Web sites and other local media will be hosting local "best of" contests developed by CityVoter, a new company started by Forrester Research alum. The "best of" contests are using a tried-and-true format popularized by city magazines such as New York and Washingtonian and widely adopted by city guides such as Citysearch and …

Sept. 28 was an interesting day on several fronts in the local search and online ad spending business, but I'm not sure that it has gotten sufficient coverage. My colleague Michael Boland did write a brief blog titled "Local Search on the Rise" on that day. Overall TKG hasn't said an awful lot about some …

Related to my post yesterday, Hitwise has some interesting data (via Greg) on the growth of UGC directories (i.e., Yelp, Judy’s Book, Insider Pages, etc.) versus that of IYPs. It’s an interesting comparison that supports the notion that UGC is in relative demand and that IYPs should get on board.

Original chart and commentary here. …

As the previous post pointed out, college towns can represent strong markets for hyper-local community sites because of the activism (conducive to user generated content), buying power (sometimes), and high turnover of apartments, furniture, books, merchandise etc.
My former colleague Greg Sterling pointed out on his blog today that a similar concept will make …

Store locators, the only "local" part of many national retail sites, are an increasingly important part of both national and local retail sites, according to "Expectations of The Cross Channel Customer," a new study released by authoritative retail analyst Lauren Freedman of The E-Tailing Group.
Freedman found that more and more locators include store information beyond …