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But in the middle of it all, the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. "If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer]," Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. "This is cheap and targeted," Pacheco explains. "Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads."

The idea is to reach out to new audiences, cut costs, and attract new kinds of advertisers.

This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content.

Content Aggregated from Other Sources

 

 Alternatively, some media companies, such as the Washington Post Co. (WPO) and NBC, are posting ads to their own sites, but are using others' aggregated content. They work with a startup called Outside.in that aggregates blogs and discussions around specific locations—by state, city, ZIP code—and serves the links up onto a map located on sites such as NBCChicago.com. There, users click on their neighborhood and find blogs and video related to happenings in the next block. Partly thanks to this feature, the overall audience for NBC's Web sites has doubled between December and February. "Our old strategy [of using only our stations' content] just had a limited growth opportunity," says Brian Buchwald, a senior vice-president at NBC. "Now, it's really about focusing on the growth of the market and being trusted by a particular user base." 

Consumers are disaggregating the newspaper and folks like Outside.in, the Huffington Post and others are putting it back together in a format that works better.

“no more commoditized ads”. Carr bemoans the rise of networks and ad exchanges but glosses over the fact that there are billions of impressions in every market that are not being sold by the best sales teams in those markets — the local media companies themselves!  They’ve ceded their leadership in the local market by trying to hang on for too long to high cpms and scarcity.  That’s not going to last.

Local sales needs to embrace the fact that ad networks are a good thing.  They roll up audience at scale that sales teams can bring to their advertisers.

Connect with your neighbors and other local bloggers. Share ideas with other bloggers and leave comments on their site.

Post early and often, or at least regularly.

Be timely. Break stories. You can cover news way before local media sources pick up on stories.

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