GrowthSpur, the brainchild of Washington Post Digital co-founder Mark Potts, launched a year ago with the intention of providing tools, training, services and ad networks for local independent media.
Working in partnership with local US news group the Journal Register Company, which publishes 170 print titles and 154 websites, GrowthSpur will help create a community of bloggers for news coverage in the Philadelphia region.
The move follows the launch of the Journal Register Company's Community Media Lab earlier this year, which offered training to new bloggers to write as part of the publisher's online community. The deal with Growthspur will give bloggers sales and marketing training and allow them to sell advertising on their site or receive a share of the blog network's total revenue.
"Many newspaper sites have had difficulty - because of cost structures and culture - effectively selling to small local advertisers, and can thus benefit from the local networks we're organising," Potts told Journalism.co.uk last year.
"We're not in the content business, so we're not going to try to rethink newsroom cultures. But we can help these more mature organisations reach a broader set of local advertisers."
GrowthSpur will offer a similar training deal to the currently 90-strong network of blogs attached to TBD.com, a new metro news site and community network for Washington run by former WashingtonPost.com executive editor Jim Brady.
"We continue to work with other blogs from all over the country to help them learn to sell ads and create sustainable business models, and we hope to be announcing more partnerships soon to build out local ad-sales networks with other media companies. Right now, TBD and Journal Register are providing us with real-world laboratories to show off what GrowthSpur can do to help local bloggers make money and tap into local advertising revenue," says Potts in a blog post on the GrowthSpur site.
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