Does it make any sense to build a national chain of city sites by hiring local editors, one by one? The answer is a resolute “no,” according to Examiner.com CEO Rick Blair, who said he’d been there and done that when he was a top exec at AOL Digital City.
Blair came on board to run …

Newspapers haven’t done too well with local search, despite efforts to leverage their potential mix of human editors and algorithms. But Boston.com made more of an effort than many others, launching a local search/directory effort in 2006. As chronicled by Nieman Lab, that effort started out on a promising note but quickly plateaued.
Given the lackluster …

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.
Digital Newsstand: Food for Thought for YP Industry?
The New York Times reported yesterday that four leading magazine publishers — Time, Conde Nast, Hearst and Meredith — are jointly developing an “online newsstand.” The initiative has …

The New York Times reported yesterday that four leading magazine publishers — Time, Conde Nast, Hearst and Meredith — are jointly developing an “online newsstand.” The initiative has ambitions of becoming the “iTunes of magazines,” according to the article. That bit of hyperbole aside, this initiative has a central idea that makes sense for traditional …

Fashion magazine Lucky has rolled out a new site that lets readers locate, get specs, and/or buy the products featured within its pages.
Partnering with loyalty shopping network Mall Networks, the site will include 100,000 fashion items from 450 brands. They’ll be featured in daily picks from editors as well as searchable by category, designer, price …

Seven Philadelphia CBS-TV and radio stations have combined their news resources to create a new Digital Out of Home (DOOH) News Network utilizing 39  CBS Always On “Digital Newsstands.” The Newsstands include HDTVs and a 24 hour news ticker.
The Digital Newsstands have been created in partnership with Center City Direct, a local marketing and technology …

Online restaurant booking success story OpenTable has started to make moves into mobile — both building apps and distributing its reservation system to other app partners.
This is a logical move, given that arts and entertainment is a big category of mobile content consumption, according to our recently released Mobile Market View study. Already, the company …

Local.com has reorganized around three business units: “Owned & Operated,” “Sales & Advertiser Services,” and “Network.” The latter unit will consist of more than 700 regional media sites, formerly associated with PremierGuide and its successor, and the new Local Distribution Network. Richard Szatkowski, former Autobytel senior vice president of advertising and business development, will be …

The discussion volume for geolocation continues to be turned up. The latest example is the geolocation panel that took place at TechCrunch’s Real Time Crunchup on Friday. If you missed it, you can see the entire session here.
If you don’t have time, start at minute 30 for some of the meaty discussion about adding geotargeted …

Small businesses that buy search spent $1,658 on average in Q3 2009, a figure that was up 91 percent from 3Q 2008, according to a new report issued by WebVisible, a company that manages online marketing campaigns for SMBs.
Thirty-three percent of the SMB search market is made up of advertisers spending between $1,000 and $1,999. …

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.
Business Transformation Top of Mind for European Publishers
I’ve just spend two days attending the Yellow Pages Today event in Milan, Italy, where publishers engaged in a very compact program that focused on “Repositioning the Yellow …

I’ve just spend two days attending the Yellow Pages Today event in Milan, Italy, where publishers engaged in a very compact program that focused on “Repositioning the Yellow Pages.” The event was really about how directory publishers have to transform their organizations in order to have viable businesses in five years and beyond.
It was clear …

Copenhagen-based mobilepeople has been making moves throughout North America over the past year, starting with its deal to power the DexKnows suite of mobile products for directory publisher R.H. Donnelley.
Its latest deal, announced today, is to power the mobile apps for Canada’s Trader Corp. Trader is the top publisher of classifieds advertising in Canada, known …

The ILM:09 conference Dec. 9-11 in L.A. is now just around the corner. We’ve handpicked 60 cutting-edge speakers, and we think we are onto something that is really important. I can tell you that signups have been great, too.
Recent adds to the speaker roster include Twitter’s Anamitra Banerji and AT&T Interactive’s Greg Isaacs, who will …

One of the often asked questions we receive regarding sales from all local media sectors is whether multiproduct selling by a single sales force is really possible. The natural follow-on question invariably is, what would be the benefit of a single sales force as opposed to specialized sales teams for each product area — traditional …

Mobile social app Foursquare is getting lots of attention and growing quickly into new cities throughout the U.S. and Europe. For those unfamiliar, the app lets you check in at local establishments to alert friends where you are.
The value exchange involves gaining “mayorship” of places where you check in more than anyone else. This gaming …

National Public Radio has been recently getting more aggressive in promoting sponsorship packages in advertising industry trades. Indeed, NPR has positioned itself as an advertising alternative to other news outlets — positioning that hyperlocal sites such as Sacramento Press are also assuming.
How far can NPR and the local public radio affiliates go as an alternative …

One of our favorite mobile products is ShopSavvy, the Android-based app that essentially turns your phone into a bar code scanner. It now joins the 100,000-deep library of iPhone apps.
Technically, what the app does is overlay a horizontal scanline on the camera’s viewfinder to scan an image and then scrape its product database and pull …

Following in the footsteps of ESPN Local and CBS Sports, Comcast will develop local sports sites on the back of its existing TV properties. Comcast has already launched Comcast SportsNet New England, which it calls “the most comprehensive and dedicated online local sports destination.” The site features local media celebrities and has added 40 new …

Following up on the previous post about BIA/Kelsey’s Mobile Market View study, the big jump in smartphone penetration deserves a closer look.
Specifically the data show smartphone penetration to be 29 percent of U.S. adult mobile subscribers (up from 18 percent last year). This will immediately strike many as too high, as it did for me …