• by Erik Sass , February 9, 2010

Outside.in, a Web developer which focuses on aggregating hyper-local content and pairing it with highly targeted advertising, has struck deals to provide these services to a number of national newspaper Web sites, including The Miami Herald, New York Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and various properties of Tribune Co., including the Chicago Tribune, several Chicago-based online news sites, and the Baltimore Sun.

Outside.in has also partnered with CNN.com and the Dow Jones Local Media Group, which owns community media operations -- principally local newspapers -- in California, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

The main service offered by Outside.in to these companies, Outside.in for Publishers, allows newspaper Web sites to create tightly focused "Neighborhood News Pages." which aggregate a variety of local news (including content from 4,000 local bloggers) in categories selected by the publisher to create custom-tailored local news sites.

The service also allows them to add tagged news maps and social-media functions like reader comments and sharing via email. Overall, the Web service aggregates and organizes over 40,000 unique news feeds, serving almost 58,000 neighborhoods. Web sites in the Outside.in network currently attract over 7 million unique visitors per month.

News publishers on the Web have focused on local news as a way of distinguishing their offerings, as national and international news has become increasingly commoditized (with similar content available from multiple publishers). Ideally, local news reaches a small but interested group of readers, allowing advertisers to deliver precisely targeted advertising to a highly engaged audience at relatively modest prices.

Not all online local news initiatives are necessarily ad supported, however. In 2009, NPR announced the upcoming launch of a nationwide local news operation dubbed "Project Argo" with $3 million in funding from the Knight Foundation. Project Argo will coordinate in-depth journalism intended solely for the Web -- on topics of local as well as national interest -- by 12 participating public radio stations.

Argo builds on NPR's Local News Initiative, which launched in 2007 to improve the quantity and quality of local news reporting by public radio stations. In the last two years, LNI laid out an overall strategy, formulated standards and style guides, conducted audience research and helped the stations produce pilot programming that aims to be more relevant and appealing -- as well as easily re-purposed for digital distribution.