I razz the local papers about not deeply covering news, or going too in depth with “Susan visited Mary on Sunday”. In all seriousness, they do a decent job covering a large area to maintain their readership.

Lately, I have been perusing the web to see what else is out there for someone who lives in a small town or region to keep track of local happenings. I’ve come across two such sites that I think have a lot of potential – Topix.com and Outside.in. (Disclosure: I am included at both sites)

Topix seems to be mostly a search engine that finds listings for a particular area or town, and does a pretty good job of listing related stories or topics. While researching how well they did for Mount Vernon (we’re pretty small), I found links to WPSD in Paducah, KY. Naturally I assumed at first glance that the programs running the site didn’t really know how far away that is like most attempted local sites. I was wrong. The link was to a story that station did regarding a boy who drowned recently at a graduation party. Pretty good job in my estimation.

Outside.in is mostly a blog aggregating site. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only blog registered for Mount Vernon, but I did look for other southern Illinois towns. There seems to be plenty of interesting writers in larger cities and some other towns. Hopefully blogging will pick up and continue, further adding to Outside.in’s reach and coverage.

Those are my recommendations for local news/reporting. Go start a blog and submit it to outside.in. I need some company! 🙂

Another site that I found recently is thesixtyone.com . The Sixty-One does a great job in allowing users to find, pick, and choose what music is popular there. The opportunity to get noticed on a fairly broad scale by actual music fans should be appealing to most any artist trying to make their way. I almost forgot to mention – there are actually some good tunes on there.

Twitter is a great way to keep up with your friends, interesting people, and even follow events where people are ‘tweeting’ updates. Some people just follow people they know, and their group keeps updated on what everyone is doing. Following celebrities gets you a little insight into their lives. Sadly, some celebs probably use ‘ghost’ writers like in any other medium. Finally, people tweet from events like SXSW, Apple announcements, DefCon, and many more. It can keep you up to date if you don’t have the ability or time to watch the actually event.

Give these sites a shot and see what you think.