This past weekend the second annual Block by Block: Community News Summit was held in Chicago and brought out local lovers from across the country. The purpose of Block by Block is to bring together local online community writers and publishers and share ideas and practices that will better your start-up or online site.
BlogLocal couldn’t be at the conference, but if you follow us on Twitter (follow us here), you probably noticed that we were following the conference’s tweets and news developments. The biggest news coming out of this year’s conference is the formation of the Independent Local Online News Publishers Trade Group. The association will aim to unite independent local online publishers and give them resources and funds they may not otherwise have, like health insurance. An excerpt from the article on Street Fight says:
“We want to have a group that represents our type of publishers,” said Mike Fourcher, publisher of Brown Line Media, who is the executive secretary of the group. He admitted that the group hadn’t yet defined who exactly “our type of publishers” are — and that the group could potentially include both singular local sites and small networks; for-profit and non-profit sites; as well as publishers operating in other countries. “We know that we have some common interests and that we want to have a representative organization. And we’re working to figure out what those considered criteria are, and what exactly that organization would be. ”
To read more about the Block by Block conference and the Local Online News Publishers Trade Group, click here.
If you were at the conference, please let us know your thoughts in the Comments!
