Today we are announcing that publications from The McClatchy Company, Dow Jones, Lee Enterprises and The Tribune Company have selected the Outside.in for Publishers platform. The full release and details are below.

It is really awesome to see these titans of local media build their neighborhood pages with our tools for aggregation and curation. It goes a long way to helping fulfill the promise of the new local media ecosystem. Big publishers need to get to a neighborhood level to satisfy their readers and advertisers and local bloggers need more traffic and visibility. Our tools bring them all together to their mutual benefit.

We’re glad these leading sites think we’re the best choice and we’ll continue to build and improve our services so everyone wins.
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MORE PUBLISHERS TEAM WITH OUTSIDE.IN FOR HYPERLOCAL CONTENT

News Organizations Across the Country are Adding Real-time Neighborhood News to their Sites

NEW YORK, NY (February 8, 2010) – In the past 7 months, hyperlocal content and advertising platform Outside.in has formed partnerships with some of the country’s most well-known publishers, including The Miami Herald, Dow Jones Local Media Group, New York Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and properties of the Tribune Company, including Chicago Tribune, Chicago Breaking News, ChicagoNow, and the Baltimore Sun.

Outside.in launched its publisher offering, Outside.in for Publishers (OIP), in June 2009 to create targeted Neighborhood News Pages for every city, town and neighborhood in a publisher’s market. Publishers using the OIP platform can create customized and curated hyperlocal news sections, add tagged news maps, and curate the aggregated news feeds to fit their editorial guidelines.

As a result, Outside.in has extended its reach to more than 100 publishers, providing consumers, publishers and bloggers the tools needed to make neighborhood news and information easily accessible and widely available.

“People have a deep interest in the news and events that are happening in their immediate neighborhoods,” said Camilla Cho, Vice President of Business Development of Outside.in. “But the ability to create, find, organize and distribute local content has historically been a struggle for many media companies. As the media landscape continues to change, more and more publishers are seeing the value in hyperlocal content, and Outside.in provides a source of flexibility, transparency and control to get hyperlocal easily and efficiently.”

In addition to growing its network of publisher partnerships, Outside.in has added 4,000 local bloggers to its roster and has seen traffic increased to more than seven million monthly unique visitors on the Outside.in Network. Outside.in currently services 57,830 neighborhoods, aggregates and organizes over 40,000 unique feeds, and provides neighborhood information to over 100 news websites.

About Outside.in
Outside.in is the leading hyperlocal content and advertising platform. Outside.in monitors all the news, blogs and discussions on the web and dynamically maps them to more than 57,000 neighborhoods in the U.S.

Through the Outside.in for Publishers platform, publishers create customized and curated hyperlocal news sections to offer highly localized content on their sites. Bloggers can distribute their content with the Outside.in Network to build traffic and attract new users to their blogs. Advertisers are able to take advantage of quality local advertising inventory.

Outside.in is supported by leading investors including Union Square Ventures, Village Ventures, Betaworks, the New York City Investment Fund, Milestone Venture Partners and CNN Worldwide. For more information, visit http://outside.in, the company’s blog or follow us on Twitter.

I was lucky to present today at the Inman Connect conference for real estate professionals.

I was asked to talk about how the local media landscape was changing.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

Not sure if there is a video with the full presentation.  Will share if we find it.

Thanks.

The hires keep coming!  Now, we are looking for the first advertising sales Account Executives to join our team.

We have been busy building great products and growing our inventory.  We now have enough inventory to effectively market to advertisers.  We need to start covering and calling on the key agencies who plan and buy local budgets on behalf of their clients — folks like Centro, MNI, etc…

If you are currently calling on these agencies, are a planner looking for a shot at selling, and want to get in on the ground floor of a fun start-up, this is definitely the spot for you.

If you are not currently calling on these local agencies or planning local campaigns, please do not apply.  We are looking to find people with demonstrable knowledge and experience in our space.

We are looking to fill these roles in our NYC office.

Specific responsibilities include:

• Hit your budgets!
• Develop and maintain relationships with all relevant contacts at each assigned agency
• Represent Outside.in with the highest level of professionalism, intelligence and client-service
• Don’t be just an order-taker.  Listen and provide creative solutions that deliver results
• Provide accurate and timely answers to client queries on a daily basis
• Analyze and optimize performance of client campaigns to drive success
• Maintain accurate forecast and pipeline reports

Requirements include:

• 2-4 years experience, in a position with sales responsibility, ideally in local media or 1-2 years experience as a planner
• Excellent listening, negotiation and presentation skills
• Knowledge of the online media business and underlying technology and research
• High-energy, results-focused, independent “do-er”
• Strong negotiation skills
• Strong account planning skills
• Good organizational and time management skills

Send a link to your LinkedIn profile to careers@outside.in.

We are looking for an Advertising Operations Coordinator to join our team and help us keep the dollars flowing through the system. The specs are below, but know that we are looking for a detail-oriented self-starter who is excited to get in on the ground floor, work hard and learn a lot as we grow our business.

Please send your LinkedIn profile to careers@outside.in.

Specific responsibilities include:

• Accurately traffic and manage all advertising campaigns, including sold campaigns and network/remnant providers
• Regularly review campaign performance, trends and delivery, and optimize monetization
• Generate reports on performance by site, partner, vertical and market and look for optimization opportunities
• Support the internal business owners and management with data and intelligence

Qualifications:

• One year of experience in an ad trafficking or coordinator role
• Experience scheduling ads into ad server (i.e. Google AdManager, DFP, etc…)
• Knowledge of search advertising products, Google AdSense and ad APIs/XML feeds a plus
• Familiarity with online advertising principles and internet technologies
• Working knowledge of Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)
• College degree

We are looking for a rock star jack-of-all trades to be our office manager and a key culture-driver at Outside.in.

The overall responsibilities of our office manager is to do whatever it takes to keep our team and office running at the highest efficiency possible and to help foster and build our company culture.

We are a bunch of aggressive self-starters and want an upbeat independent person who takes initiative and doesn’t wait for direction.

Specific responsibilities include:

• Help setting up and maintaining our awesome new office space;
• Facilities and equipment management;
• Assisting Accounts Payable and Receivable
• Tracking vendor and partner contract compliance;
• Managing start-dates, orientation and details for new team members
• Phone and administrative support, including expenses, travel and scheduling;
• Plan company events, meetings and meals (bagel Thursday!)
• Supporting the team in any way needed

Requirements include:

• Prior office management experience in a small, entrepreneurial company;
• Strong verbal and written communication skills;
• Positive, upbeat attitude;
• Technology-savvy — comfortable setting up VoIP phones; troubleshooting printer, scanner and fax issues, ordering and setting up new laptops, etc…
• Proficient in MS Excel and Powerpoint
• Bonus points if you have real world experience with QuickBooks.

If this is you, please send your resume to careers@outside.in.

Mark Josephson, our CEO, recently participated in a panel and interview on MediaBistro.com about building hyperlocal businesses and communities. The panel largely agreed that the explosion of content is a boon for the local industry and an enormous revenue opportunity for media companies. You can see Mark speaking directly to that point in this clip.

The interview focused on building an audience with a new site.  If you’ve ever met Mark, you know his passion is a driving force for himself and his companies. To MediaBistro.com, he articulates how passion is key for content creators who are building an online audience, “Find something you’re passionate about and find those people who feel the same way and connect with them.” That’s advice Mark has taken to heart in building Outside.in.

It feels like almost every week I read about a new media venture sprouting up thanks to grant money from xyz foundation or donors. NPR recently received a $3MM grant from the Corporation for Publication Broadcasting and the Knight Foundation to fund bloggers and curators in 12 cities. There is a long list of recipients that are embarking on online local news ventures, including:

• Minnesota Public Radio: recently received a $5 million grant from an anonymous donor to boost its news operations, to be matched over time.
• Texas Tribune: the non-profit public media organization has received a total of $750,000 in grants from Houston Endowment and the Knight Foundation to fund their writers and reporters to cover a wide range of topics and produce stories across multi-platforms.
• Oakland Local: a project of The Center for Media Change focuses on local news and issues with a strong community news component; their seed funding of $25,000 is a New Voices grant from J-Lab, a program at American University funded by The Knight Foundation.
• St. Louis Beacon: received $90,000 from the Knight Foundation a year ago to expand the local reporting staff and provide a viable alternative site for local news. More recently, The Missouri Foundation for Health awarded the Beacon a $100,000 grant to fund a health reporter, news technology and research support.

The most recent news comes out of Chicago where a dozen groups have received a total of $500,000 in grant from the Community News Matters program. The list of recipients struck me, not because of WHO they are, but HOW they are planning on using the funds. Many organizations will use the tens of thousands of dollars to cover news in specific neighborhoods and hire/engage bloggers and citizen journalists.

A boost of cash is great but what happens after it’s all spent? Apply for more grant money or is there a viable business model to keep it running? How that initial source of start-up funding will be spent is key. It’d be a shame to hire a bunch of bloggers and curators and then lose them when the money runs out. It’d be disappointing to see the launch of a hyperlocal news site with great community information that can’t update the data on a regular basis when the funds run dry.

I am all for financial support, especially for these types of new media ventures, but the opportunities that the grants provide for need to be seized in a right way that is strategic and sustainable. With the generosity and good will of many of these foundation and donors, combined with the passion and entrepreneurship of these upstarts, we at Outside.in see this as a great opportunity to work with the ventures to help build and execute on an efficient and viable business model. Assuming that these grant recipients are in it for the long haul, we have ideas, products, and tools to help them meet their short-term and long-term goals.

We are looking for a dynamic individual to lead our Product Development efforts.  He or she will help make sure our collective vision for a new platform for local media is executed flawlessly.

Specific responsibilities include working with the team to build and refine our overall product roadmap and scope the features, functionality, competitive positioning and performance of all of our products.

The ideal candidate should be a proven leader and have prior success at a revenue-focused online media company.  He/she should have experience running a product organization that includes new product development, project management, research, graphic and UI design. Experience with local media and the geo-web is a definite plus.

This is a hands-on job that requires deep knowledge and demonstrable industry-leading experience with all facets of online publishing, media and software, including:

• All types of online advertising, including national and local search and display
• Different types of ad pricing (i.e. CPM, CPC, CPA) and targeting (i.e. geo, behavioral, contextual, retargeting, etc..)
• Performance and conversion optimization
• Ad servers (i.e. DFP, OpenX, etc..)
• Ad networks and exchanges
• XML feed aggregation
• Content aggregation and syndication
• Consumer media destination businesses
• Semantic algorithms and NLP
• Search engine optimization
• Analytics and reporting
• UX and usability
• Development methodologies and Software Project Management

Additional Requirements

• College degree (MBA preferred) or equivalent experience
• Minimum 10 years online media experience
• Strong management skills
• A strong network of fellow industry leaders
• Superior interpersonal and communication skills
• Insatiable desire for “what’s next” in media and on the web

Outside.in is a fast-paced, high-growth company and values innovation, speed, quality and results.  We look for people who share those values.

Please send a link to your updated LinkedIn profile to careers@outside.in.

My colleague Jared provided a great commentary on this blog after the recent New Business Models for News Conference and HyperCamp at CUNY. Thought I’d add a few more thoughts from the revenue angle.

As Sean Blanda points out in his recap, and repeatedly expressed by the confab attendees, a major unmet need in the hyperlocal space is around selling. In other words, what I heard loud and clear is: “I need revenue!” As this conference re-affirmed, there are plenty of journalists, bloggers, publishers (large and small) who are producing and featuring hyperlocal content, the challenge is how does one monetize this content.

Not surprising… after all, who doesn’t want to make some money? But here is why this is interesting:

• No real mention of the usual self-service online sales route, such as Google or other ad networks). You can read into what is NOT being spoken aloud here… Google AdSense is not enough. Generating pennies off of clicks may work for the behemoth that is Google, but not for the independent local news site. Folks are well aware of how big the local ad market is ($100B+) and appear hungry to go after some of this big pie.

• I sensed a DIY attitude when it came to ad sales. Individual publishers want to know how to sell. Journalists may not “do spreadsheets” but maybe some will do sales? I’m usually a fan of the DIY mentality and entrepreneurial spirit, but to make local ad sales work, DIY will not cut it. Local networks need to form to provide scale and efficiency. Rather than you sell what’s yours and I sell what’s mine, how about the best person sell on behalf of everyone in the market?

• Not every hyperlocal site or news org should have to sell. The staff of the new news organization should focus on what they are good at, and in most cases, that will not be sales. The ability to sell is not something you teach and voila: You’re now making money. I wish it were that simple. Not only does it require recruiting the right people and training them properly, but you also need to equip them with the right tools and products to sell with, and most importantly, incentivize and motivate them to sell something that is not theirs. But local sales teams that have the skills and relationships already exist. The key is how to connect them with the relevant inventory that best services the advertisers… Sounds very similar to the challenge of connecting the big media folks to the local network of bloggers.

So, what does all this portend? Well, the future is still being shaped (by some of the folks there at the conference and other thought leaders and innovators), but a few things are clear on the ad sales front: Training will not be the answer and generating meaningful local dollars will require more cooperation and collaboration amongst the relevant parties. Yes, more group hugs are in order, as Jeff Jarvis insisted. And local networks being sold by the right sales teams will be the key in this new ecosystem.

By the end of yesterday’s New Business Models for News Conference at CUNY’s J-School, one thing was overwhelmingly clear: Bloggers want to get their content on major media sites and major media sites want this content.  Yet, according to these two groups, there remains a big problem: How to do it?  Upon hearing this, we at Outside.in felt great because Outside.in for Publishers delivers a solution to this problem.  Let me elaborate.

The so-called Reverse Panel, a rather clever idea on the part of Jeff Jarvis put this issue in relief.  Jeff put 6 forward-thinking “Big Players” (Jim Willse of the Star-Ledger, Jim Schachter of the NY Times, Jennifer Carroll of Gannett, Goli Sheikholeslami of the Washington Post, Jim Brady of Politico, and John Paton of ImpreMedia) at the table and asked the room full of bloggers, small publishers, and tech start-ups to tell the Big Players what we would like them to do.  What do we need from them?  What could they do to make our jobs easier?

The bloggers said, “We want you to give us visibility and traffic.  When we scoop a story that you like, we want you to put it on your site and give us the credit.”  The publishers agreed, saying they want the content, and in fact, they went so far as to claim, more than once, that without taking advantage of the great journalism happening on blogs, their businesses will fail.  Everyone agreed on this point.  The stumbling block was around the How.  How do the publishers surface the blogger content on their site in a fair, respectful, and mutually beneficial way?  What does that relationship look like?

That’s exactly what we’re working on. With Outside.in for Publishers, we’ve built a platform that enables publishers to display headlines, links, and summaries of blogger content on their sites.  It generates hyperlocal ad inventory for publishers and gives traffic and visibility to bloggers. Essentially, we’re making this relationship easy.  OIP is automated yet full of opportunities for customization.  Publishers can choose the sources from which they get content.  If they’re really picky, they can even select the stories that come from those trusted sources.  The editor becomes a curator of the blogosphere; the tools are in their hands.

Many publishers have already begun their work with Outside.in for Publishers, yet of the panel members, only the New Jersey division of Gannett (represented by Jennifer Carroll) has taken advantage of the service.  So, to you others I pose an honest question: if you know you need to leverage the blogosphere, what’s holding you back from using Outside.in for Publishers?  Every day we’re improving our platform.  I encourage you tell us exactly what you need so that we can help you hurdle the stumbling block of the How.