Markets

All News is Local, and Effective, for Outside.In

By David Weir

Updated on: February 12, 2010 / 5:18 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Outside.In's CEO Mark Josephson could hardly contain himself when we spoke for the first time in more than a year today, as I asked about how his company's "hyperlocal content and advertising platform" has been faring.

"Hyper-local! Neighborhood! Up! Up! up!"

Josephson's excitement is understandable. His startup network has been able to scale from around a million monthly users last time we checked on it to somewhere around 7.5 million today, according to Quantcast, which now ranks it as the 166th largest website in the U.S.

Outside.in now has partnerships with 100 major media companies, including recent additions like the McClatchy Company, Dow Jones, Lee Enterprises and the Tribune Company, that have joined The Miami Herald, Dow Jones Local Media Group, the New York Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
These partners select from among 40,000 local sources of news, primarily a well-established network of bloggers hungry for the greater exposure and influx of traffic they can get via the Outside.In Network. The company's algorithms draw in news, blogs and discussions from the web and dynamically map them to some 57,000 neighborhoods in the U.S.

The publishers for the most part are newspapers that have been drastically cutting back on their national and international coverage, laying off reporters, and struggling to survive. Josephson believes they are in the process of "retrenchment in order to own their local neighborhoods. But they can't afford to hire reporters to sit in every neighborhood they serve," he notes.

"Our self-service tools for publishers allow them to create neighborhood pages with transparency so they can see every potential source," says Josephson. "Then they select the ones they want. They need to have this type of tight control over the content."

Perhaps the best example of how this works can be seen over at the New York Post. From the newspaper site's "NY Local" tab on its homepage, you can navigate to 26 neighborhoods in Manhattan, 35 in Brooklyn, 61 in Queens, and so on.

Besides pulling in headlines and abstracts from local blogs, the system gathers social media content from geo-coded Tweets from Twitter and Yelp reviews, as well as crime data and notices of local events.

The quality and quantity of content varies by neighborhood, naturally, since from a hyper-local perspective most of the country outside of major metro areas remains as open as it was during the Wild West era.

Josephson views the network he is building as an "ecosystem for local news that serves publishers, bloggers, consumers and advertisers. All the key participants have to contribute to it, because if anyone doesn't, it can die."

The company's algorithms are calibrated to pinpoint data to within 1,000 feet of whatever address you enter into its system.

Although Outside.In also bills itself as an "advertising platform," that remains more aspirational at present than actual. Josephson assures me that the advertising piece is "upcoming" and that there will be more news about that later this year.

Outside.in's investors include Union Square Ventures, Village Ventures, Betaworks, the New York City Investment Fund, Milestone Venture Partners and CNN Worldwide. CNN came in as part of a $7 million round announced last December, and apparently is preparing a more localized news service that will also launch later this year.