TechFlash interviews Serra Media’s Mark Briggs; Local Onliner profiles TownLuxe

Serra Media CEO Mark Briggs chatted recently with TechFlash’s John Cook about hyperlocal news, the future of journalism and innovation.

BargainBabeLA.com, which uses Serra Media’s TownLuxe platform, was also covered today on the Kelsey Group blog and Local Onliner blog. In the post, blogger Peter Krasilovsky talked about some of the appealing deals he learned about thanks to BarbabeBabeLA.com.

Here are some highlights of the Techflash Q&A. Check out the full interview here:

What makes hyperlocal news a promising opportunity? “To me, it is that one untapped area especially for online advertising. I think there is still a lot of potential and opportunity within the digital local space because you have all of these small, little advertisers who maybe did yellow page advertisements and they couldn’t even afford the newspaper…. Now, with digital technology if you build that targeted audience, you can deliver super, highly-targeted ads that the audience is not going to see as interruptive.”

As a new media pundit, what do newspapers need to do to survive? “I think they would be smart — and I’ve always thought this — if they actually committed to being a Web site first. (If they) considered themselves a digital property that happens to put out a print product, they would be ahead of the game.”

Where should they invest? “If you had an Internet company called The Seattle Times, you’d be pouring massive amounts of resources into mobile right now. Massive. Because mobile is going disrupt news and information just as the Web did ten years ago. So maybe they missed on the Web, but they can still take advantage of mobile.”

On launching the TownLuxe local shopping service: “(My wife) looked at Newsgarden and said: ‘That’s great, Mark, but I think it really should be used for shopping…. BargainBabe.com launched our platform on July 1 and we’ve actually seen more contributions in one month to her, than we have in one month for any of our news platforms. So we think people may be more interested in contributing items about shopping, than they are about news. Shopping is something that everybody does … and everybody at one point or another has bragged about a great find at a store or a great deal they’ve got. That’s what we are tapping into.”

- Amy Rainey