Justin Carder is the VP of business development for Instivate, maker of the Neighborlogs publishing system for local news sites, and is also the founder and owner of the Seattle neighborhood blog CapitolHillSeattle.com. Previously, he worked for MSNBC, Microsoft and Marchex.

Stuffed in a drawer in my basement are the following:
1 pair of REI rain pants
1 $350 Arc’teryx all weather jacket purchased when I still worked at Microsoft
1 pair waterproof socks
1 pair waterproof longjohns
1 KEXP wool cap
1 pair waterproof fingerless gloves
1 pair not-even-close-to-waterproof sneakers

It’s winter hyperlocal-news season in Seattle again.

One of these nights, my iPhone will buzz with a sortie of incoming texts from neighborhood tipsters about a mystery police helicopter circling East Pine Street. I’ll stumble downstairs and throw on my community newsgatherer superhero outfit while calculating whether it would be faster to drive and try to find a parking space on Capitol Hill’s crowded streets or walk to what could be nothing but a random, circling helicopter at 3 AM. In the meantime, I’ll fire up my iPhone’s emergency-band scanner app and try to figure out WTF is going on. I’ll spin through a few local Twitter searches, find out the helicopter is now over Broadway and head out into the rain.

Nothing about this situation scales. And yet the Seattle online community-news war rages on. What are we fighting for?

At last count, there were more than 40 independent, online-only news sites operating in Seattle, not to mention the other 40 or so corporate, big-media plays active in the area. The players range from a publicly traded broadcasting company with hundreds of employees to a three-person news start-up (ours) called Instivate to a community-focused hobby site operated by a well-off banker with an itch to better his neighborhood through civic journalism. Not all of these will survive but the game isn’t about one winner, with one best business plan and one best editorial policy. The game, it turns out, is about talented individuals banding together in loose confederacies that create new kinds of value.

The hyperlocal news aggregation service Everyblock is measured by Quantcast, so we are able to see exactly what MSNBC got for its “several million dollars.” Everyblock, which currently covers 11 cities, generates 1.5 million pageviews a month. If you add up the pageviews for independent Seattle community-news sites West Seattle Blog and MyBallard and our Neighborlogs network, you also get 1.5 million page views a month. Lump even a portion of these sites together, and you start to have something interesting. The best way to foster true, local, online community news – and beat the big guys—is for the small guys to share resources (revenue, technology and information).

Back out in the rain, my waterproof socks start to make my ankles sweat. I’m trying to type on an iPhone while wearing fingerless gloves. In the rain. In addition to blogging for my site CapitolHillSeattle.com, which covers the streets northeast of downtown, I also work at Instivate, which provides a free publishing system for local news sites in return for a portion of their advertising revenue. Using that platform, I can post news to CapitolHillSeattle.com from anywhere I have cellular reception.

I am the reporter dude from Max Headroom, only I don’t really do video because I don’t have the new iPhone yet, but you get the idea. That broadcasted breaking-news article about the mystery helicopter waking up people all over the neighborhood will drive pageviews, which drive impressions, which generate, rather more slowly than you might like, revenue from ads paid for by businesses in that very neighborhood. I just need to figure out a way to keep typing with the water rolling down my screen.

Meanwhile, in a dry office somewhere else in the city at a much more humane hour of the day, a recently graduated business major is digging through my news site, clicking on every single ad on the site. He doesn’t bother to click on the helicopter story. He doesn’t live in the neighborhood. He slept fine last night. He is calling my advertisers and offering them a “better” deal on “the” neighborhood’s news web site. 

He is selling ads for the local TV station’s big play at creating hyperlocal-news sites, and scaling that system to every neighborhood in the city. The ad guys scale too. If you keep hiring more of them. The content? The way they do it, it scales without question. You can fill 43 sites with press releases, it turns out, without getting sweaty ankles even once. Is there any real news involved? Ad guy doesn’t know. But he knows who advertises on my site, and some of them he talks to more than I do. He is helping turn online community news into TV news.

But here’s some breaking news: We’re not really up against the TV people. My company is a two-person start-up – now three with an ad guy of our own. We’re also not up against the other successful neighborhood sites in town that may or may not be someday competing with the Seattle community sites using our service.

No, our real competition is from the wave of information flows from sites like Twitter, YouTube and flickr. And the only way to survive is to work with that wave and find ways to be part of it rather than creating structure that tries to wipe it out. Build a new piece of the network, stick an ad on it, get rich.

Why Seattle? Why does this part of the community news wave seem to be happening here first? Reasons ranging from the infux of content-related workers over the past 20 years, to the separation of the area’s largest neighborhoods. I came here to work for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) in 1996 as the company’s first – and last – journalism intern. When I graduated from San Jose State University that same year with a journalism degree, I was most-prepared for one thing: poverty. My education had been a combination of old, washed-up newsroom junkies telling me how little money I would make and long nights farting around with headlines trying to get the next morning’s paper out at one of the few college papers still printing.  Those professors told me I would be lucky to make $16,000 a year. They were pretty much dead on.

It’s not my ad system’s fault. The self-serve system, which we built, is my secret weapon. It’s the kind of thing that nobody gives a hoot about when they talk about the Seattle indie-news scene – most people are obsessed with the professionalism and integrity of the sites—and yet it’s actually worth watching.

Also worth watching is the next generation of daring infonauts starting to emerge in Seattle. This group won’t be confined to neighborhoods. Publicola, TheSunbreak and a few more efforts in the works will be remarkable not just because they built a web-only news-and-info brand but because they did so at light speed and right under the noses of the big guys.

Back in the rain on some cold, sopping wet Seattle night, I won’t be able to find the SPD PIO to ask WTF is happening so I will bug one of the cops sitting inside the mystery cars below the long-gone mystery helicopter. I won’t get much from the officer but my phone will ring a few minutes later. It will be the PIO telling me to go online and check the SPD blotter blog for details. I’ll walk home in waterproof socks to gather the information, post a picture or two and, hopefully, get some sleep.

Nothing about this scenario scales – except the networks and the technology. And they won’t keep your socks dry.