Providing local content

In his column, the Times public editor noted reader complaints about the paper's dropping of local coverage (of NY's Westchester county, for example). That's an issue that design firms face, too, if they operate from multiple locations. From a communications standpoint, I think you have to devolve the responsibility - hand it off to people you trust and let them address local markets as they see fit. The blog format may lend itself to this. Design firm websites now typically let users home in localities as they check out credentials. What a blog can do is speak in detail about what the office is really doing in the community, and who's doing it. The firm at large can decide whether to wrap these blogs up directly (by linking to them) or to quote selectively (as content for web features). Meanwhile, the local blogs gain some measure of credibiity and authenticity by being rooted in a place.