Yes - this is my point. As in the U.S. there are probably 200(?)newspapers that are in markets large enough to attract the business of aggregator/specialty sites. The other 1200 daily newspapers in small towns and cities are still the best position to leverage local vertical information such as restaurant reviews and listings. They should still be involving reader reviews/ratings/comments - but this effort is something smaller local newspapers can still build a niche business around.

Maybe a bit off your main point - but in fact YES isn’t it hard to get the data?

There are 300 restaurants in our city, and a huge percentage have not yet been reviewed by the paper, and even fewer have been made more than a line of text in any national search engines. Sure newspapers can buy or use that same directory information, but the real value at the local level is detailed information, professional reviews, reader comments and etc.

Is there anyone that can do this work and make it profitable in terms of ad revenue or readership in small towns and cities other than the local paper?

We are a small (some might say tiny) newspaper that derives 95% of our revenues from local advertisers. So if someone is looking for something from our community, they at least know enough to search “bowling green newspaper.”

So we put our archives behind a firewall after 24 hours that makes linking to them difficult (not impossible) and after 14 days behind a subscription firewall that makes them impossible to link to.

We’re here to serve local folks. If you can’t find Bowling Green, KY, on a map, our advertisers aren’t interested in your traffic to our website. I think the same applies for any newspaper.