It’s been a week of hyperlocal brainstorming for me at both the New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit in DC and the Hypercamp conference in New York yesterday. Luckily, editors and practitioners from around the country agreed on a few best practices for media partnerships and monetization for hyperlocals:

Media Partnerships

Some ambitious hyperlocal blogs are earning extra money and broadening their audience by syndicating their content in other publications. For hyperlocals with reporters on the ground, the ability to scoop major media outlets can be profitable: newspapers and broadcast networks are sometimes willing to pay for breaking news or investigative work that they don’t have the resources to cover.

Other blogs form blog networks, where they actually partner with niche blogs in their same area. As Jarvis said at Hypercamp, “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.” Under this philosophy, a hyperlocal editor would spend her time focusing on local news, but might partner with an existent sports blog in the area, or a blog that focuses on state-level politics. By sharing content and information the blogs can generate more content and reach wider audience.

Debra Gallant, who runs BaristaNet.com and was referred to in New York as the “queen of hyperlocals,” partnered with an existent parenting blog in her community early on. Now, they share a name, content, and ad profits—split 40/60—and have had a great deal of success.

Similarly, up in New Hampshire, the ForumHome.org partnered with citizen bloggers at the State House to monitor how local representatives were voting on issues.

Since the conferences, I’ve set up a meeting with a local Spanish-language print newspaper in my area. We’re hoping to cross-publish some content (since I post in English, and they in Spanish), and perhaps work on some collaborative articles about the Latino community that we can both publish simultaneously. We’re leaping across media and language boundaries to try and spark positive conversation in the community.

Innovative Monetization

Much of the conversation at Hypercamp focused on one question: how do we monetize? With hyperlocal sites popping up across the country, everyone wants to know how this new medium can be profitable.

The suggestions I found most interesting included events, conferences, and ad networks.

At the hyper-regional site, NewWest.org, three conferences a year on land use, planning, and architecture issues bring in enough revenue to support in-depth journalism the rest of the year. Professionals that need annual education credits pay $160-260 attendance fee to hear speakers and participate in workshops and networking.

It’s interesting to imagine this possibility for InJersey: having a statewide conference on New Jersey-specific issues like development or open space or government corruption; and then using the conference to generate ideas for the blogs and vice versa. It would encourage a whole new level of in-depth journalism on the hyperlocal scene, and also offer broader perspectives on regional issues.

Finally, almost everyone at the Hypercamp conference seemed eager to see ad networks put in place. In practice, groups of hyperlocals would band together to get regional and national ads, and split the revenue. This is basically the model that Patch.com is working to create; but companies like Google are simultaneously working to set it up for independent blogs.

This way, hyperlocal editors would max out their local ad potential, and still be able to grow their income through regional and national ad dollars. If they go through a third-party, they wouldn’t even have to worry about crunching the numbers (which can be difficult for left-brain journalists).

This will definitely come into play on the InJersey sites, and I’m excited to see if we can tap into regional ads together, in a capitalistic kumbaya kind of way.