Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Six years ago, at a high school event in suburban New Jersey, Michael Shapiro was covering the story for a hyper-local news site he had founded two years earlier when he spotted a journalist from an established local print newspaper from the same town.

“I extended my hand to shake hers,” he recalls, “and she turned around and walked away. People who saw it, their eyes opened wide. They couldn’t believe it.”

Those were the early days of Shapiro’s foray into hyper-local news. He was a former lawyer who was building a network of websites covering towns in New Jersey, and some of the state’s old-guard journalists, didn’t like it. Getting the cold shoulder from them, he says, was not unusual.

“They saw us as a threat,” says Shapiro. “It was also a matter of, ‘ Who are you to come into my town,’ as if it’s their town.”

But things have changed considerably since then. Now, Shapiro presides over a rapidly expanding network of 51 hyper-local franchises dotted throughout New Jersey and, more recently, New York state. (Two more just signed on and will launch this spring. A brief expansion into Pennsylvania failed.)...