In an effort to cover as much local news as possible, I thought I’d go to every local startup website I could find and subscribe to their newsfeed. As a one person side-project operation, I don’t have the luxury of spending hours a day finding news at this point. And besides, why not let a feed reader gather interesting news for me and let me get to the good stuff as quickly as possible?
Well, I think I might have found one of the reasons that good local news isn’t discussed that widely. After checking every one of ATDC’s companies (which I would expect to be representative of most local startup companies), only one company has a blog (that I could find, let me know if I missed any) and one other has an RSS feed of their news stories (again, tell me if I missed any). Over ATDC’s 42 listed companies, I found 11 without news sections, one with listed stories but no link to them, two “coming soon” type sites, one with a broken news page, one site that was totally broken, and two without dates on their stories. Of the remaining 24 companies that listed press releases, only 12 companies had releases from the last four months (August - December, 2007). One company’s most recent release was in 2001 (announcing their joining of with ATDC).