Can a National Blog go local ?

Jemima Kiss on the Grauniad reports that the Huffington Post is going local:

Huffington said the Chicago site would aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources as well as contributions from bloggers in what will be the first of a series of projects in "dozens of US cities". The Chicago site will initially be curated by just one editor.

"We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news, not just the political blogging the way we began," said Huffington, speaking at Guardian News & Media's internal Future of Journalism conference.

This is in my view one of those "what do you do when you have grown to your limits as a national level blog" strategic things. You either diversify content genres or diversify content locales. It tells me more about where they think their current market is topping out than anything else.

But doing local online news is no easy matter, with a number of failures to date. Its also far less scalable even if it does succeed in any one place. And it is going to hit competition from Craigslist.

Good luck....they'll need it!