Why we want to retweet your tweets and get your word out

Welcome! The Breaking News Network is a national hyperlocal network in over 300 cities dedicated to community service and social media sourced news. Each city in our network is managed by locals. If you’re a business, civic group, arts organization or good cause, and you’re actively using Twitter to share your community news, events, initiatives, [...]

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Hyperlocal as Community Service

The classic, and perhaps only business model supporting hyperlocal journalistic efforts like Patch.com and other local media is local advertising. On StreetFightMag.com last week, Ted Mann, Digital Development Director for Gannett NJ, discusses why Gannett’s hyperlocal experiment InJersey.com failed. The main and obvious reason is simply local advertising cannot adequately cover expenses. So… What if [...]

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April 28 & May 2 Webinar: Become a Local Media Star

This is the video from the “Become a Local Media Star” webinar presented by Susie Hale and Housing Trends eNewsletter. For more details on Breaking News, please attend our follow on webinar by registering at this link, or contact me by email Slideshow of webinar: Housing Trends eNewsletter Webinar: Become a Local Media Star View [...]

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How to make a better Local News site

Local community news has always been hard to produce profitably with scale. Local news is only relevant to those who live within the community, and it makes cost per thousand based advertising models untenable when readership may log in the hundreds. Without a revenue model to hire editors and writers, the cheapest way to source [...]

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The Next Phase of Group Buying Systems (Slideshow)

The next phase of Group Buying Systems View more presentations from Pat Kitano Groupon announced its new Deal Feed that allows consumer to customize and monitor and filter the types of deals and merchants they want to track. The Deal Feed works in coordination with the new Groupon Stores product so that consumers can “follow” [...]

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Webinar – New hyperlocal apps

Last Friday, we discussed the accelerating development of new hyperlocal and mobile applications by giants Facebook, Google, Yahoo and AOL. The hyperactivity is being driven by the demand for group buying (“Daily Deals”) opportunities and local media resources to distribute these daily deals. Reference sources: Evolutionary Product Development goes into Overdrive Unable to display content. [...]

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Ten ways Facebook Deals changes the local deals landscape

Facebook announced yesterday that businesses can add deals and rewards for their customers who check in through Facebook Places. The impact on local advertising is huge: 1. Deals will be everywhere The “Deal” becomes the currency of local advertising because it is performance based, efficient for reaching the customer and isn’t burdened with the CPM-based [...]

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The Future of Hyperlocal Marketing – Mothers' Networks

The recent mainstream media articles demonstrating evidence of Groupon’s shortcomings (including last week’s article) are focused on the consequences of its massive distribution capabilities and non-local presence. First there was the dodgy fake deals in Brazil, then there was a business owner saying offering a Groupon deal was the worst business decision she ever made, [...]

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The New Hyperlocal Business Opportunities that Groupon spawns

Business Insider’s Evan Britton’s article How Entrepreneurs Can Cash-In On The Groupon Fad provides a glimpse of the future of hyperlocal marketing by listing five new opportunities inspired by Groupon. I’ll list these methods and expand on Mr. Britton’s list with concrete examples: 1. Create a blog. The blog platform, particularly WordPress, is ideal for [...]

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Engage your community by giving them what they want: Daily Deals!

You may have been introduced to Groupon from last week’s $25 for $50 worth of Gap clothes offering. It sold 441,000 coupons across America and made “Daily Deals” the war cry of the new local advertising model for the Great Recession. We’ve always believed the best way to engage your community is to give them [...]

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