robcurley.com/2007/07/16/loudounextracom-launches/

i’ve poked and clicked pretty deeply and read rob’s note, and honestly, this doesn’t feel much different from the local sections we were building as far back as the late 90s for small market and bedroom communities. it has a lot of depth, navigation is clearer, and the page play and multimedia flash players are cleaner, higher quality and more advanced, but seriously, this hyperlocal journalism that everyone is so hyped up about has been done by independent weeklies in small communities forever, they have the content, but only in static html.

among my first tasks working for scripps in florida back in 98 (gads i’m getting old!) was building evergreen guides for neighborhoods in our zones that had traffic cams, school and church guides, park info, and all that plus guest columnists from condo associations, retirement/gated/bedroom communities (ala bloggers) — and all that content was readily available from the existing editorial, we just had to pull it from archived annual special sections and package it and keep it updated. and this was going on absoultely everywhere at the time, by ron dupont and many, many others in florida and elsewhere around the country, like jim derk in evansville, indiana.

the only thing we are doing that feels any different to me is that we’re giving it more PR, especially inside the industry. the essential challenge in managing a wide spread of hyperlocal content and successfully leveraging it into a wider network of brands and deployments is taxonomic. and i don’t see that challenge being creatively confronted here.

the templates are nice though.

too bad this will wind up so disjointed across the country… this is where a third party provider could made a huge impact.