AmericanTowns, the national network of hyperlocal, community-based websites, today announced a content relationship featuring local news from Topix. Commencing in early 2008, AmericanTowns will add headlines and synopses of top local news stories from Topix to the extensive local information and resources that AmericanTowns provides daily for each of the 15,000 communities it serves.
The inclusion of local news within its websites will further strengthen AmericanTowns’ position as a “shared community webspace” where local citizens can find and share the information most important to their daily lives. The Company has already developed information on 150,000 community organizations. These organizations and their members have made over 100,000 postings to AmericanTowns sites, which the Topix news content will now supplement. Last month, AmericanTowns announced that it had achieved the milestone of listing 10 million community events online in 2007.
AmericanTowns has also recently announced content relationships with other leading providers of local information, including local traffic information from Traffic.com and the best available prices at more than 59,000 hotels nationwide, provided through Alliance Reservations Network. Other content partners include Career Builder and SuperPages.com.
“Topix will enable AmericanTowns to add local news stories to our extensive, well-organized local information base,” said Jim Maglione, AmericanTowns co-President, Community. Providing local information of all types is at the heart of AmericanTowns’ mission of strengthening communities. “This new relationship with Topix is part of a programmatic effort to incorporate best-in-class resources into our local offerings,” added AmericanTowns Chairman Ted Buerger, who also handles strategic relationships for the company.
Founded in 2000, AmericanTowns completed a Class A funding round from angel investors earlier in 2007, followed by a $3.3 million strategic investment in September 2007 from Idearc Media Corp., the NYSE-listed publisher of the Verizon Yellow Pages and home to Superpages.com®. These funds have been used to build the Company from a regional leader in the New York City suburbs to a nationwide community-based service. Traffic growth has been 50% per quarter in 2007. Content offerings have expanded even more rapidly.
About AmericanTowns
AmericanTowns is a national network of community-based websites where residents can find and share local information, and includes the nation's most extensive online database of community events, community groups, local resources and special tools for organizations. For each of 15,000 US towns (total population: 270 million), AmericanTowns has created a “community webspace” to connect citizens, community organizations and locally-focused businesses and to strengthen the bonds of our nation's communities. With its national growth in 2007, AmericanTowns has featured more than 10 million community events, and offers powerful tools to help more than 100,000 listed community organizations interact more effectively with local citizens. Founded in 2000, AmericanTowns is headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut. Visit www.AmericanTowns.com.