When Local News Gets Hyper

With advertising revenues for print media going nowhere but down over the past five years, the big question in media has been whether or not a viable business model exists for online journalism.

Tracy Record, whose West Seattle Blog posted revenues in the six figures this year, may have an answer.

Although it started in 2005 as a source of opinions and observations about the neighborhood, West Seattle Blog quickly garnered enough attention to prompt local businesses to ask for advertising space. In 2007, Record resigned as assistant news director at KCPQ-TV to work on the blog full time. Record became the editor and her husband, Patrick Sands, sold advertisements.

Today, the word “blog” doesn’t do the site justice. The West Seattle Chamber of Commerce named West Seattle Blog its Business of the Year for 2009. That same year, West Seattle Blog ranked No. 5 on Google’s list of the most-searched local terms for the entire city of Seattle.

The blog is still a two-person operation making all of its revenue from display ads. Although Record won’t say exactly how much the blog is making, it does earn enough to pay freelance contributors, and she has plans to hire full-time staff later this year.

“You can’t run something like this with the layers of management that corporate media always have,” Record says. “Everybody has to be directly engaged in producing something rather than just supervising the people who produce something.”

Record’s success inspired Seattle journalist Cory Bergman to launch Next Door Media, a network of neighborhood blogs, in 2008.

“We felt that their model was something that had some real traction,” Bergman notes.

Like West Seattle Blog, Next Door Media’s blogs are powered by display ads, which sell for $75 to $150 per month. Each blog is edited by a journalist living in the neighborhood, and the vast majority of the revenue from each site goes to its editor. Although Bergman is also hesitant to release numbers, Next Door Media recently added three new blogs—MyWallingford, MapleLeafLife and WedgwoodView—to its network, and may add more this year.

“We’re not a high-cost enterprise, so we don’t feel pressured to drive more revenue,” Bergman says.

Hyperlocal sites are not just small business ventures. Last year, Fisher Communications Inc. launched a network of 43 hyperlocal neighborhood websites in the Seattle area. The sites were based on an online platform developed by Bellevue-based DataSphere, which raised $10.8 million in investments this year.

However hyperlocal sites develop their business models, Bergman predicts an “explosion” of neighborhood news sites across the country, and sees Seattle at the forefront of the emerging trend.

“The Seattles, Portlands and San Franciscos of the world will see a more vibrant neighborhood blog culture than elsewhere in the country,” he says.

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