A tidbit from journalist and social media consultant Simon Owens: Susannah Vila, a grad student at Columbia, has launched NYC.is, a site that works like Digg or Reddit, but for New York-specific content. In an e-mail to the New York Observer, Vila said of her site:

“There are thousands of bloggers and independent reporters writing in and about NYC, but no hub to connect them all. I think my site is the only one connecting all the different small scale bloggers, reporters, or anyone at all who wants to write about his or her community, giving him/her a place to promote their work and network with each other.”

Owens, who has been providing PR support for the site, said in his e-mail to me:

I thought this was neat and interesting because this isn’t your typical VC-funded start-up, but rather a grad school student who’s working on all this stuff from scratch.

This definitely looks interesting and has potential. I know that I’ve certainly been looking for a “hub” for blogs and news sites in the Triangle area. Right now, that hub only exists on my iGoogle pages, and I know there are good sites out there that I haven’t come across.

As with many other online journalism experiments, I would really like to see this concept tested out in smaller cities and towns. Launching in major metropolitan cities like New York definitely offers certain advantages for new media experiments trying to get off the ground. However, I’ve always believed that if newspaper companies were to start dying out en masse, it would be the small towns that suffer more. A huge hub like New York or even some of the second-tier metropolitan cities will likely always have a decent number of people ready to pick up the slack, since that’s the sexy stuff. Filling the void left in Podunkville, however, would be a more hit-or-miss situation. Therefore, I think it’s important that we develop some new media models that are created specifically to serve those smaller towns rather than being designed for big cities and then refinagled for smaller markets. Instead of having all our experiments start in New York or San Francisco and, if they work there, scaling them down for Dinktown later, let’s have some experiments start in the smaller cities and towns for expressed purpose of serving those markets. Or let’s try the experiment in a selection of cities and towns of varying sizes, so we can see what kind of market it works best in and the sort of challenges we might face in scaling the model up or down.