Hyperlocal Goes Mainstream: CNN teams up with Outside.in

I've been interested in the hyperlocal blogging movement since I started blogging. Once you have your own printing press, you start thinking about what you might write about the place you live. And I've written about school sports, little league heroics, contentious local issues, and a host of other hyperlocal news over the years.

My unwavering belief is that we will cover ourselves when it comes to local news. We are at the PTA meetings, the little league games, and the rallies to save our local institutions, so who better to cover them than us? This is what hyperlocal blogging is all about and it is slowly but surely it is gaining steam.

Today, our portfolio company Outside.in, which aggregates up all this hyperlocal blogging and makes it available and discoverable, announced a partnership with CNN which, among other things, means that hyperlocal bloggers will start seeing their posts on CNN. That's a big deal. This is the mainstreaming of hyperlocal blogging and its about time.

Outside.in powered neighborhood, town, city, and place pages are already hosted on more than one hundred media partners around the country, including the New York Post, Dow
Jones Local, Media General  and Chicago Tribune. Here's an Outside.in powered page on the New York Post about the Flatiron district in NYC, where our firm Union Square Ventures is located.

If you operate a local media business, big or small, and you want to add the voices of hyperlocal bloggers to your pages, then click here an learn more about Outside.in for Publishers and get started. If you are a blogger and want your stories on CNN and media partners like the New York Post and others, then make sure your feed is in Outside.in's index. You can do that here.

It's taken a long time for this vision to become a reality, but it's happening now. We are covering ourselves and big media is leveraging our voices to cover the local news that they can't get to. It is very gratifying to watch it happen.

Update: Outside.in's founder Steven Johnson's post on the news is here. And here are the engineering hires that Outside.in will make with the new cash. If you are an engineer looking for a new challenge, please take a look.