News Near You, which the Google-owned site introduced this spring, detects the location of its users and provides lists of geographically relevant news videos using the same IP technology as dating and weather sites.

YouTube’s strategy differs from the path taken by GoogleNews, because it asks outlets to sign up and feed content to YouTube rather than “sending digital spiders around the Web to collect videos automatically,” according to the Times. Out of 25,000 invites sent out, just over 200 have signed up so far. YouTube expects that number to grow as the News Near You module becomes more familiar.

The module uses the Internet address of a visitor’s computer to determine the user’s location and whether any partners are located within a 100-mile radius. If so, seven days of local videos are displayed.

But in many places, namely urban markets, 100 miles can hardly be counted as a local area; Steve Grove, the head of news and politics for YouTube, said, “we’ll get a smaller radius as we bring on more partners.”

Mr. Grove said about 5 percent of users who see the News Near You module watch at least one local news video, a rate that YouTube sees as encouraging.

The Times cites VidSF.com as one of the independent video news operations taking advantage of YouTube’s distribution and marketing power. Here’s VidSF’s coverage of a “pop-up” wedding in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood:

For national news networks, the added feature doesn’t signify much apart from the continual push towards local coverage. But for the local news stations that already have enough to worry about, News Near You may soon provide a fresh forum for independent broadcasters and hyperlocal videographers to post their content and keep it apart from stuff like crazy cat videos.

Notably, Shapiro’s territory includes Millburn and Westfield, where he rubs shoulders with some big-time media players–Patch (recently bought by AOL) and The New York Times’ The Local (in Millburn)–experimenting in hyperlocal.

How has the launch of Patch and The New York Times’ The Local blog affected your business?
It’s interesting; I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far with how it’s affected our business. Before they got there, I wondered how it was going to impact us. I thought the lure of a big company, with lots of money, would cause a problem. But, we’ve not only held our own, we’ve attracted a lot of their users and one of their reporters came over to us.

The only place it’s hurt us is in the area of publicity. Believe it or not, despite what we’re doing and the success we’ve had, not a single media outlet has covered us at all. They’ve done all of these stories about Patch, The New York Times, and BaristaNet and here we are, I created the site from scratch, we’re bringing in money, we’re bringing in more in revenues than any of those sites with the possible exception of BaristaNet, which has been around for years, and nobody has covered it. [Editor's Note: The NYT launched a self-service advertising vehicle for The Local on Wednesday.]

It’s kind of frustrating because it’s like, “this is newsworthy!” Here’s a local guy, with all local people competing with him in the same market and we’re never mentioned. If it was something where we weren’t getting traffic or we had no advertisers, I well could understand it. But at this point, we have more advertising than both of them combined. That’s incredible to me.

Have you done marketing to get the word out?
We’ve done PRNewswire and other things to get publicity but nobody picks it up. Otherwise we have grassroots pr. We’re at the Summit street fair and we’re doing email marketing. But, that kind of limits us at this point. Our traffic keeps going up, but if we could get mentioned in a major publication, even in the stories they’re doing about Patch or the Times, our users would go through the roof.

Talk about how you’ve been able to ramp up so quickly. Your staff has grown right along with your coverage area, how have you been able to manage it?
We now have over 100 paid freelance reporters, over 20 columnists and a 3-member sales team, all built up since October.

On the sales and business side, one avenue has been bringing on people like realtors or people with sales experience who are looking for part-time gigs. Like moms whose kids are gone in the morning until three, so they have that chunk of the day and then they’re back to being moms.

Basically, we’re always looking for sales people. We are struggling to handle the volume, we cannot handle the number of calls coming into us. Just in our 10 towns alone, there are approximately 20,000 businesses, so we need more bodies reaching out to the businesses that are not calling us.

What do you see as the potential for growth on your sites?
We have almost unlimited space for advertising, even if we hit the space we can start rotating ads. If we do a back of the envelope, it’s literally millions in revenue. We say to people you can advertise on our site for as little as $99 up to google.

We have a free business directory. For $99 you get an annual premium directory listing, which includes a logo or photo, a link to their website and it comes up first in the directory.
The same goes for real estate listing, which runs $15 to post your house for 3 months, as well as the community calendar. Inventory for those is basically unlimited, but our sales people aren’t even selling them right now.

As far as growing the number of towns, we could be in 100 towns tomorrow, but my feeling is you do it right. Before we launch, we go to do outreach to leaders, build a local advisory board, and put some reporters on the ground.

We’re probably going to continue a gradual expansion to more towns in our area. I don’t know if we’ll grow at the pace we went in the first year because 10 towns is a lot to cover.

What happens if the daily newspapers start going out of business, what does that mean for Gothamist?
Newspapers like The New York Times have really been financed by wasting an enormous amount of other people’s money and it’s hard to feel good about what they’re doing.

If the Times goes out of business because they’ve made poor business decisions, then so be it. They haven’t been that innovative, they tend to copy other people’s ideas, and they’ve made some poor decisions by investing in declining assets. And that same argument applies to pretty much every paper.

It’s businesses like Gothamist that will replace the Times or other dailies. It might not be Gothamist per se, because this business is very competitive, but it will be somebody like us.

Things are going to get much smaller, but that’s what happens when a monopoly dies. That doesn’t sound like a horrible thing to me. In fact it sounds like a pretty exciting thing. I don’t know why we should root for the 500-lb gorilla.

Gothamist relies on the reporting in those papers for a certain percentage of its coverage, will Gothamist increase its editorial staffing to fill the void?
We only aggregate 30 percent of our content from the Times, the Post or the News. Some of that news will come from independent media. There are something like 500 or 600 independent news sources in New York, and they will not disappear. Some of the rest we will report ourselves. So, we’d still have sources for the news, we might have to work a bit harder at it. If the Times went out of business, we’d get a bit of that advertising and be able to pay for more writers.

I’m sick of this idea that we’re just parasites. We break 5 or 10 stories a week. We broke the pug story last week- where the lady with a sick dog was arrested after an altercation with a Hasidic cop on the subway. That story ended up in the Post and The Daily News the next day. We broke the story about the Vox Pop Statue of Liberty being tortured. That made it into the Post.

We definitely aggregate more stuff from the dailies than they take from us, but given their budget is 300 times as large that’s not surprising.

Most of your advertisers are national, are they generally buying into the entire Gothamist network? Do you use sales reps?
Most of our advertisers are national, but they generally prefer specific cities. They’re national brand advertisers who have a preference to buy cities per campaign.

We’ll still do most of the sales ourselves. I’ve hired a couple of people over the years to help in reaching out to specific brands. But, mostly it’s a lot of people coming to us. Hopefully we please them and hopefully they come back—maybe they tell their friends or other media partners about us.

Do you have a local sales operation?
Only to the extent that we have a list of targeted local advertisers—30 or 40 in each of our big cities—that we talk to. They’re advertisers like museums, show venues, large stores, people who organize events in those cities. They are the same kinds of advertisers that you’d see in an alt-weekly.

What needs to happen on the business side of the online news space, in your view?
The one thing I’d like to see that would be helpful to smaller guys is some kind of real self-service model that works and is targeted at smaller local advertisers.

All of the alt weeklies collaborate in a clearinghouse to sell national accounts. Each of them owns a portion of the company, and gets a share of the profits. We need something like that, but it first requires a tech solution for local self-service and I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe it’s that they’ve tried and it hasn’t worked.

Without it, if you’re trying to run a neighborhood blog it’s going to be hard to do if you’re not doing direct sales. I believe in sales, but hearing it isn’t going to make you do it.

The Observer’s John Koblin reports that the NY Times is considering putting a meter on usage of its site and charging once you’ve read too much.

Incredible.

They’ve spent the last 15 years trying to get people to stay longer and read more on their site and now they’re going to penalize their best customers? Readers’ inner dialogue is not hard to imagine: ‘Uh-oh, should I read that next story – and see that ad and maybe find something worth linking to and bring in other readers? It might start costing me. I’d better conserve my Times characters; they’re adding up; already read 20,000 of them. I think it’s time to go elsewhere now.’

This emotional rush to charging for charging’s sake is not only getting dumb and dumber but it’s also going to be destructive.

I fear The Times has been lunching with cable people. They should instead take Tom Evslin out for drinks. I’ve told his story here and in my book. Tom is the unsung hero of the internet who, when he ran AT&T Worldnet, was the first major ISP to go to flat-rate pricing of $19.95 a month for all you can browse. Tom took the clock off the internet. What happened when he did? We no longer worried about that tick, tick, tick. Usage exploded. The internet became part of our lives. Now The Times is thinking about turning the clock back on? If it does, that clock is ticking down its own lifespan.

Koblin says The Times is also considering creating some sort of club: give money (here’s the tin cup) and get a tote bag and a chance to watch an editorial meeting. (Having sat through too many editorial meetings elsewhere in my day, I’d say you’d have to pay me to sit in any more.)

The rush to charging is also getting sadder and sadder. It’s like watching a grandmother who has run out of money and so, to afford the drugs she needs to save her life, is looking around the attic for any heirloom she can sell on the corner.