Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers, which is playing a major role in Google’s vital local strategy, along with Google Places, …

For newspaper publishers and newspaper readers, iPad apps tend to be nice to have but not especially important. Given the choice of rich newspaper apps like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I actually opt for the browser versions over the apps: I can see a lot more at once, they’re updated …

Whenever one writes about the future of newspapers and other news organizations, a voice in the back of his or her head says: “They’ve tried that already and it didn’t work.” Fifteen years into the digital revolution, that’s the dilemma confronting the news industry as it once again revisits possible solutions. Thankfully, no one is …

Some cities have unique professional communities that make them a company town with its own media. Washington D.C., of course, is a government town, well served by Bonneville’s WFED-AM. Similarly Huntsville, Alabama, is a space town; Los Angeles is a movie town; New York is a finance town. Each has its own media.
The medical community, …

“Content is king.” It’s one of the oldest, most frequently trumpeted maxims in media. Original work commands a premium, while aggregation and curation are merely commoditized collections for easy distribution…or so the thinking goes. Only, what happens if the script is flipped? That’s the question that Martin Nisenholtz, senior VP of digital operations at The New York …

AOL will buy The Huffington Post for $300 million in cash and $15 million in stock, and put Arianna Huffington in charge of the AOL Local sites (MapQuest, Patch, MovieFone) as well as its growing collection of opinionated tech and vertical news properties, such as TechCrunch, Engadget and Popeater. AOL’s vertical sites, such as …

The Internet, and now mobile, has long been an excellent way to present the proverbial “hyperlocal” news content, those stories that are just too parochial to make the local news broadcast or the pages of the local metro daily. Finding a way to make hyperlocal truly hyperlocal and how to make it pay have been …

At ILM:10, SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff revealed that his fleet of brand-based online sports communities is now experimenting with high school sports through the launch of a Washington, D.C., trial site (part of DC.SBNation.com) that will “test if the model scales to that level.”
The competition in the digital sports space — with CBS, Comcast, FOX, Yahoo and …

If the first two decades of the local Internet were primarily about on-boarding traffic, then CBS Local Digital Media President Ezra Kucharz foresees that the next decade will be about “opening doors to consumers, getting them the information they want, and getting them to transact.”
This philosophy drives CBS Local’s digital philosophy across its 28 owned-and-operated …

As “the media capital of the world,” New York is rife with daily newspapers, high-culture magazines and lifestyle publications, yet Trevor Sumner says he had “no idea what was going on in my neighborhood. I couldn’t even keep up with restaurants in the East Village.” That lack of district-level information inspired NearSay, a start-up site …

High school sports have been the centerpiece of many hyperlocal efforts. They bring to the table highly passionate fans, families and players in the hard-to-reach 12- to 17-year-old demo.
But the economics of school-by-school efforts don’t always work, whether for branding, region-wide advertisers and advertising sales, production needs, data and content acquisition, or site infrastructure. Just …

AOL’s Patch gave a progress report today on its $50 million hyperlocal initiative. The site said it now has 100 hyperlocal sites, and will launch 400 more over the next six months. It also said it plans to hire at least one journalist in each community, adding 500 new journalists as part of its growth. …

The latest attempt to make hyperlocal a sustainable reality came today with Allbritton Communications’ launch of TBD.com, a hyper metro site for the Washington, D.C., area. Allbritton, which has sunk “under $5 million” into the project to date, hopes it will grab hold of the D.C. audience in the same way that its Politico has …

The Sacramento area is fast becoming Ground Zero for local blog networks. McClatchy’s Sacramento Connect, a project carved from The Sacramento Bee, is a content connector for 70+ area blogs and Web sites. It started incubating last summer and was fully in place by March.
Connect, which is subtitled “best of the local Web,” can …

Michael Zimbalist, who runs R&D at The New York Times Co., told Inman Real Estate Connect attendees in San Francisco yesterday that the rise of social networks has spearheaded a very real shift from “the paradigm of publishing to the paradigm of communicating.”
“The consumer is squarely at the center,” said Zimbalist, noting that there are …

Everyone is fighting for a better, more cost-efficient way of producing content for Web sites. But is the so-called “content mill” search optimized approach of a Demand Media, Associated Content or Examiner.com the only way to achieve this?
Whether you agree or disagree with the characterization of these companies (we largely disagree), alternatives are out there. …

Newspapers aren’t doing well, but they still represent one of the leading ways to reach audiences, online as well as in print. New data from comScore Media Metrix, apparently released to coincide with Editor and Publisher’s Interactive Media Conference taking place in Las Vegas, showed that 57 percent of Internet users in the U.S. looked …

Main Street Connect, a new hyperlocal network founded by former community newspaper executive Carll Tucker, former SmartReply exec John Falcone and others in the New York suburbs, notified the SEC on May 26 that it has raised $3.97 million for “working capital” from ten angel investors. The same form notes that the company will …

News aggregation is being approached in every which way, driven by the long-tail possibilities of search optimization, and less and less local output from newspapers, TV and radio. The content creator sites, hyperlocal sites, blog aggregators and portals have also been aggressively pursuing aggregation of local content (including Fwix, which we profiled last week).
But where …

The U.S. Local News Network says that its San Diego News Network site is launching a weekly print edition of its best news stories. Print editions have been looked at by other sites to raise visibility for the site and reinforce advertising relationships. InsiderPages actively promoted a print edition in Pasadena several years ago.
President Chris …