In the old days of the web, people saw it as a way to reach the world.
Yet the web, and the media, is changing. There are millions of web sites and blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, YouTube channels and Tumblr accounts.
Instead of reaching a global audience, people are trying to reach a local audience, or a specialized one, or an audience that's both local and specialized.
This is a great opportunity in public relations, because you're typically trying to reach a specific targeted group of people.
Political candidates, for example, try to reach a very targeted audience. In the party primary, your message needs to find Democrats or Republicans who reliably vote in primaries. In general elections, you're targeting independent and undecided voters. And that group is much smaller than the voters who turn out in presidential years.
This kind of micro-targeting is moving toward other fields with other public figures, whether you're a rock star about to go on a world tour or an author with a new book coming out.
In each case, you don't want reach all 7 billion people on the planet. You want to reach a specific audience.
There are dozens of sources for national and international news: Reuters, AP, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC and CNN.
How many sources for local and neighborhood news do you have? In most places, the competition is much lower.
Cities with more than one daily newspaper are rare in the United States today. Many outlets have a monopoly in local news, especially in small towns and neighborhoods.
The void in the market is why web-based news aggregators and gatherers are moving fast toward local and neighborhood news. It's a specific audience with a specific need they can't fulfill by looking at a big website that tries to cover the world. Advertisers want to reach local and neighborhood audiences, because their stores are located in neighborhoods, and they want to reach specialty audiences worldwide.
This is why you've seen local discount and coupon sites like Groupon get valued at billions of dollars. Localized or specialized news and advertising is more powerful than the shotgun approach.