Peytonplace.com

There's still wariness among locals unaccustomed to being covered so closely by bloggers. One Friday at 3:30 p.m., Millburn.Patch editor Connic is interviewing town administrator Gordon. He dutifully answers questions about the agenda at the next Township Committee meeting. As the interview concludes, Gordon reflects on his new life in the hyperlocal media spotlight. "They drive me crazy," he says. "You have a lot of people blogging who may not know the facts—what is rumor becomes fact, [and] I have to worry about running the town, not rumors." At times Gordon longs for the days when the weekly newspaper, The Item, was Millburn's sole watchdog. "It was slower, and [its] reporters mostly stayed in their office," he says. So Gordon is adapting. When the town's phone system went down recently, he relied on Patch to explain why town hall couldn't be contacted.

Patch.com was founded in 2008 by Tim Armstrong, 38, who was Google's top advertising executive until March of this year. That's when AOL named Armstrong its CEO; three months later AOL purchased Patch for an undisclosed sum. Now it has local bloggers like Connic and Delo running sites in 11 towns in New Jersey and Connecticut. That makes Patch, which plans to expand nationwide, one of the fastest-growing of the hyperlocal empires. In August MSNBC.com bought EveryBlock.com, which was founded by Adrian Holovaty, a rising star in Web-journalism circles. The site offers news about social, civic, and commercial life on neighborhood blocks (listed by ZIP code) in 15 U.S. cities, including Chicago and Miami. Three big newspaper chains—Gannett, McClatchy, and Tribune Co.—own Topix.com, which bills itself as a federation of hyperlocal sites. In August ESPN launched a series of city-focused sites. Even nonprofits are getting in on the act: the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation put up seed money for EveryBlock.com and other hyperlocal sites such as PlaceBlogger.com and Rural News Network.

The influx of new sites may be the first real threat to small-time bloggers who helped pioneer the hyperlocal concept. Maplewood native Jamie Ross founded MaplewoodOnline.com in 1997. Back then the site was an old-fashioned digital bulletin board, but lately it has added Web video and what he calls "nog," or newsy blogs. When Patch and TheLocal came to the area, Ross says, they picked off some of his bloggers and online commentators. He admits that it's nerve-racking to suddenly find himself facing the likes of AOL and the Times. "They have millions of dollars and I don't," he says. Outside observers say the bigger worry is that too many sites are trying to subsist off the same small base of advertisers.

Still, the sites are attracting readers, and with low expenses, they may prove to be viable businesses. Data from Compete.com, a Web analytics company, suggests that in any given month, no less than one fifth—and often far more—of the average population of the towns covered by the local bloggers is clicking on the sites. Patch cites internal data suggesting it's already reaching more than half the population in areas it's covering. Web-news guru Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive-journalism program at the City University of New York, has done an extensive study of hyper-local economics, and he's optimistic. "The most startling and hopeful number I have found is this: some hyper-local bloggers, serving markets of about 50,000, are bringing in up to $200,000 a year in advertising," he says. That's small beans to big media companies, but if an operation like AOL's Patch can link together a network of $200,000-a-year sites each run by a single reporter, and then amortize big expenses (like technology and ad sales) across multiple sites, you could start to see decent profits. The low overhead is crucial: not only are startups like Patch using less costly labor, but they also believe readership and revenue will grow as networks of hyperlocal blogs link to each other, and as they become adept at persuading small businesses that never advertised in newspapers to give online advertising a shot—a key to Patch's strategy.

Journalistically, it's easy to dismiss the ambitions of sites manned by citizen journalists and unpaid interns—but lately they've begun to garner legitimate scoops. In September, Alternative--press.com, another hyperlocal site, broke a story of hazing at the highly regarded Millburn High School. Then Millburn.Patch posted an explosive story, including graphic details, of how female members of the senior class had circulated a "slut list" describing the alleged sexual escapades of incoming freshman girls. Other local bloggers jumped in, with TheLocal and MaplewoodOnline both advancing the story. Within days, the "slut list" scandal hit The New York Times and NBC's Today show. It's not exactly the Pentagon Papers, but as America's newsrooms continue to empty, the hyperlocal blogs are allowing a new generation of watchdogs to walk the beat—when they're not hanging out at Starbucks.

© 2009