As you may have already heard, we just released a brand new Outside.in Hyperlocal News API — the latest addition to Outside.in for Publishers suite of powerful publisher tools to create hyperlocal experiences easily, efficiently, and economically. We built the API for creative and savvy publishers looking to innovate ways to engage their consumers with hyperlocal news and information.

What can the API do? Quite a bit. Publishers can build and design mobile apps to custom web experiences by tapping into our massive database of more than 54,000 sources from local bloggers, journalists and mainstream sources for any neighborhood, city, state, and ZIP in the U.S. API users can filter the results by various parameters such as date, number of stories, source attributes (e.g., vertical/category, format, author type), and keywords. A few ideas:

• Take local to the next level by bundling the right source of neighborhood news targeted at specific demographics like moms, foodies, or college students
• Add dimension to existing personalization experiences by empowering readers to find and save news for neighborhoods they care about

What clever ideas do you have?  Get going and introduce the API to your developers: send them to check out the documentation on our API portal where they can get an API key to start playing around.

What are the benefits?

• User Engagement & Advertising Opportunities: The API opens the door to tons of local content that publishers can slice and dice to fit their editorial and user needs, all of which create robust streams of targeted advertising inventory.
• Reliability and Speed: Outside.in provides a proven hyperlocal platform that meets the scale and performance needs of some of web’s biggest publishers such as CNN, Tribune, The New York Post, and MediaGeneral (with more to announce in the near future). In fact, we first previewed the API earlier this year to power the local news on CNN.com and the CNN iPhone app.
• Hyperlocal Expertise and Support: With so many possibilities to explore, our Partner Relations team is available and happy to help publishers vet ideas and provide the necessary guidance and support along the way.

How do I get started?

1.     Check out the details here and introduce your developers to the API. Have them sign up for a dev key to see what the API is capable of and take it for a test spin.

2.     Give us a shout via email to discuss any of the following:

• Terms for a commercial relationship. (Note that the API is free for non-commercial use up to 5,000 queries per day.)
• Enable curation on API implementations via the Outside.in Hyperlocal Publisher Dashboard.
• Transition to an API-powered experience. (If you are an existing Outside.in for Publishers partner, we can generate a separate key for you to ensure that the API inherits your curation settings from the Publisher Dashboard.)

There is a lot to take advantage of, so start building your own unique hyperlocal experience today!  We can’t wait to see what you will create!

*P.S. Follow @outsideinAPI for the latest scoop on the API.