Earlier this week we wrote about one person’s ideas on what newspapers need to do to survive and thrive.

Today we want to talk more about the opportunity for a new model for local news, one that provides as much value to the the traditional local publisher as it does to local bloggers and hyperlocal content sources.

We think there’s an opportunity for a virtuous circle where publishers connect with local bloggers and content to bring hyperlocal content and ad impressions to the publisher and traffic and revenue to the bloggers.  Make no mistake, if a new model is going to be successful it needs to be a two-way street.

I was on a panel this afternoon at the Newspaper Association of America’s mediaXchange conference in Vegas (baby!) where I proposed three pillars for a new model for news.

Those pillars are:

• Aggregate

Local media companies need to get “more local” or hyperlocal to compete for audience.  The current biz model and editorial cost structure don’t allow them to hire reporters to cover every neighborhood.

Couple that with the explosion of hyperlocal content, literally hundreds or thousands of “stringers” in every market that are craving more traffic and more revenue and there is opportunity.

That opportunity centers on Aggregation.  Dynamically sourcing every single local piece of content and organizing by discrete neighborhoods can immediately make make you hyperlocal.

• Curate

But, every publisher has a different editorial voice and a different audience.  And, how do you make sure you are featuring only the content you want and not sources or posts that don’t fit your editorial vision?

That’s where Curation comes in — being able to sit at a dashboard and pick and chose, highlight and suppress — make editorial decisions on top of a massive aggregated data set.

Historically, editors make curatorial decisions about their own internal content — which stories to assign, what to feature on page one.  Going forward, those types of curatorial decisions will be made on other people’s content as well.

• Networks

But how do you solve the revenue and inventory challenges these companies face.  One way is to build Networks.  Local sales is done best by local sales teams.  Period.

Local inventory is being commoditized by the national ad networks who are driving prices down.  Local sales teams have the best relationships and the greatest opportunity to create solutions for their advertisers, if they only had the inventory that ad networks have.

So, become that network.  Partner with the blogs and hyperlocal media properties in your market and represent their inventory.  You will have different margins (more on that in a future post), but you could stand to have 10x the inventory.   Say what you will about ad networks, but they are big, growing and profitable.  Local newspapers should be too.

I was also able to preview our new product that helps publishers build their business on the pillars of Aggregate, Curate and Networks. We’re really excited about how we can help facilitate these relationships and can’t wait to announce it in more detail soon.

Until then, we are working with a select group of local publishers in our beta version and invite you to join us.

If you are interested in joining the beta, drop me a line at mark<at>outside<dot>in or visit http://www.outside.in/publishers.