Peytonplace.com

Until recently, a fender bender or a gas leak in Millburn, N.J., was treated like the minor event that it is. Then Jennifer Connic arrived in town. Connic, 32, is the editor of a Web site called Millburn.Patch.com, part of a chain of local sites called Patch.com, and since February she's been covering mundane events in this suburban town of 20,000 residents with a zeal most journalists re-serve for a big scoop. Connic shows up at so many auto accidents that for a time Millburn Fire Chief Michael Roberts began going too, just so he could deal with Connic's questions while his firefighters worked. At Millburn town hall, town administrator Timothy Gordon often spends part of his week alerting the Millburn Township Committee about what news Connic is likely to break next—so they hear it from him, not from her blog. For decades the locals got their news from a sleepy weekly newspaper, but now, with Connic, rival bloggers, and the "citizen journalists" they recruit walking the Millburn beat 24/7, Gordon sometimes has trouble staying abreast of town controversies. "They can come across problems before [town officials] know about them," Gordon says. (Article continued below...)

Millburn is ground zero in what is fast becoming America's first post-newspaper media war. Dailies like the nearby Newark Star Ledger or The New York Times once had local reporters who'd cover places like Millburn, but as newspapers' finances have unraveled, coverage of outlying villages has shrunk: in April the Times cut its news sections for New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island, and Westchester County, N.Y., to one page. In the last year, however, a group of community-focused blogs, run by journalists but relying heavily on citizen-commentators, have risen up to take their place. For them, no event is too local. Millburn.Patch.com recently reported on efforts of town officials to encourage use of parking-meter tokens, while rival TheLocal showcased "Rainbow Fish," a colorful drawing by a local 9-year-old.

As humble as it sounds, that coverage is making three New Jersey towns—Maplewood, South Orange, and Millburn (including its hamlet Short Hills)—a hotbed for cutting-edge ventures in hyper-local journalism. At last count, 10 different Web sites were focusing on the three communities—including the newly launched blogs Patch.com, funded by AOL; TheLocal, a New York Times–owned site; and Maplewoodian.com, run part-time by a Maplewood resident. Bloggers and media companies were drawn in part by the areas' affluent demographics and quaint, commercially vibrant downtowns filled with potential advertisers. And New Jersey is merely a launchpad for the hyperlocal upstarts. The Times, for example, has pondered the idea of franchising TheLocal to various communities. Patch.com already is swiftly expanding. At stake is the $100 billion market for local advertising, typically extracted from merchants such as dry cleaners and pizza parlors. Even as the overall ad market has declined during the recession, forecasters at Borrell Associates estimate local online ad spending will rise from about $13 billion in 2008 to $14 billion in 2009. In New Jersey, the invasion of journo-bloggers has amazed local officials. "We've gone from being sleepy little news towns to being boomtowns," says Maplewood Mayor Victor DeLuca.

The hyperlocal concept dates back to the early to mid-1990s. Microsoft, for example, experimented with an urban-focused entertainment-listings site called Sidewalk.com in 1996. But the concept really gained momentum this decade, with high-profile sites, such as Backfence.com, launched by hyperlocalism evangelist Mark Potts, and LoudounExtra.com, which The Washington Post Company (NEWSWEEK's owner) launched in 2007 to cover prosperous Loudoun County, Va. Thousands of hyperlocal sites have now sprouted nationwide. But the model has yet to produce a seminal success story—and in fact there have been significant failures, including LoudonExtra, which shuttered last month. Yet the Times's entry into the game is an encouraging sign that big players still see a future in hyperlocal coverage, a model that virtually eliminates the huge printing and delivery costs that burden newspaper publishers. The sites typically employ one or two experienced reporters, supplemented by mostly unpaid amateur commentators and interns.

If you live in one of the towns where hyperlocal sites are taking root, you're sure to notice the phenomenon. I live in South Orange, and first became aware of Patch's outpost there about a month after it went live. At the town's old brick train station, the South Orange editor, Cotton Delo, was handing out fliers to Manhattan-bound commuters. Several weeks later, walking into the Starbucks two doors from the station entrance, I noticed Tina Kelley, hunched over a laptop sporting a logo for TheLocal and a notice reading THE JOURNALIST IS IN. The New York Times launched TheLocal in March. Kelley, a veteran Times reporter who lives in Maplewood, covers her hometown and the two next door with three unpaid student interns and as many citizen journalists as she can muster for user-generated content. In a "Why We're Here" post that explains the site's philosophy, its editors proclaim that TheLocal will be "what you want it to be."